December 2022
Dear graduates and special friends of MU Family Medicine,
Each day brings new joys and new challenges. But then without notice the days that are past have accumulated, and another year is behind us. As we look to the future and the start of a new year, we remain focused, optimistic and committed to our mission to lead and to serve.
1: To advance health and primary care through leadership in PATIENT CARE.
“If we build it, they will come” certainly reflects our experience with family medicine in mid-Missouri.
- The two-year old Battle Avenue clinic is well established and full of patients even as we add new clinicians.
- When Audrain County lost its hospital and employed clinicians, we opened a new practice in Mexico and brought a long-serving local physician and nurse practitioner into our department. Mizzou Urgent Care joined us in our facility on Clark St and is clearly meeting community need as well.
- After major construction delays, our Boonville clinic is on target for opening in March 2023 and with plenty of space in a well-designed facility we seek to grow that practice. Interested? Give me a call. The new clinic will include urgent care, specialty outreach, physical and occupational therapy, x-ray and CT scanning.
- We are now in six communities with 13 locations including our 3 retail clinics. Challenges include strategic planning to secure the vital role family medicine plays in the lives of patients locally and nationally.
2: To advance health and primary care through leadership in EDUCATION.
Graduating medical students when reflecting on their education at Mizzou Med continue to give our third-year family medicine clerkship exceptional reviews. One-on-one time with passionate faculty in clinical settings both on-site and off-site is the centerpiece of this education, and our faculty give generously of their time to students eager to learn. To further strengthen our commitment to rural communities, we have launched a longitudinal integrated clerkship in Sedalia with plans to expand this educational initiative. This complements the existing off-site clerkships in the School of Medicine Rural Track program as well as our thriving Springfield campus.
At the residency level, the match this year brought us an amazing group of residents who started in July, including the first two residents in our newly developed Bothwell Rural Family Medicine Residency.
3: To advance health and primary care through leadership in SCHOLARSHIP/RESEARCH.
Strategic planning and strategic hiring at the campus, medical school, and department levels continues with the goal of increasing funded research. New faculty have been hired and our recruitment efforts continue. Biostatisticians serving the broader medical school research community are now at home in Family and Community Medicine.
To succeed in our efforts to achieve this broad-reaching mission requires hard work, commitment, and funding.
We are grateful to faculty, staff, and residents for their commitment to our mission. We are also grateful to our family of donors whose generosity has provided valuable support for the important work we do that generates either no revenue or inadequate revenue, particularly education and scholarship. This fiscal year our departmental budget hovers around $25 million; we anticipate 6-7 percent of that will come through state support for the campus and student tuition.
I particularly want to recognize donor support for the Future of Family Medicine endowment; this fund has made it possible for us to find innovative ways to make changes, touch lives and initiate meaningful activities that had no other source of revenue.
To those who have sent a gift to MU Family Medicine, I thank you and hope we can count on your support again this year. And to those who have not yet donated, I invite you to consider joining our family of donors who help us do our part to assure the future of family medicine.
Endowments are essential; the funding they provide is dependable and permanent. For a complete list and description of our endowed funds, or to make an online gift, please visit our website: fcm.missouri.edu/giving.
Thank you for being there and for doing what you do. We are honored to call you friends, colleagues, and advocates for family medicine. On behalf of everyone here at MU Family Medicine, I want to wish you a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season and all the best for 2023.
Best regards,
Michael LeFevre, MD, MSPH
Professor and Jack M. and Winifred S. Colwill Chair
lefevrem@health.missouri.edu
