Bridging the Past and Future – A Consultant’ s Perspective On The Journey To Establish An Independent 4-Year Medical School at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine And Science
By Paul Umbach
My relationship with Charles Drew University began in 2006 when I was contacted by Senior Associate Dean Ron Edelstein to discuss the feasibility of developing an independent fouryear medical school. Since that first conversation, my affiliation with CDU has brought me the most personal and professional joy of any project over my 40-year career.
At the time of our first conversation, my firm, Tripp Umbach, was in the early stages of assisting other clients throughout the United States in what would become a national movement to expand medical education and develop a new generation of community health-focused medical schools. Ron was interested in how our work developing new medical schools in Scranton, Phoenix, and Miami might inform the creation of a new independent community-based medical school in south Los Angeles.
While 15 new allopathic medical school campuses have opened since I first met the CDU team now charged with this great endeavor, I believe that the new independent medical school program at Charles Drew, which is now less than a year from admitting its proposed first class, is the nation’ s most needed and transformational medical school. This is the project that I believe best represents the opportunity to transform community health and wellbeing through medical education, research, and clinical practice.
All successful projects are rooted at the intersection of three words that start with the letter“ P” – people, place, and purpose. At this intersection the impossible becomes possible. Looking back on thousands of projects in hundreds of communities throughout the world, there is no place where these words – people, place, and purpose – are more aligned.
My firm completed an economic impact study of CDU in 2010, following the closure of Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital in 2007. That event coincided with the discontinuation of multiple residency programs. Our study concluded that several actions must occur for the University and community to rebound, and reach its full economic and social impact potential. Namely, the reopening of the hospital, reestablishing residency training programs, and developing an independent fouryear medical school.
Between 2010 and 2017, I continued to serve as a volunteer consultant to Dr. Edelstein, and later to CDU President David Carlisle and COM Dean Deborah Prothrow-Stith when they arrived during that intervening period. I, among many people, was watchful as to how the medical community
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 8