Robert Wachter Named Chair of the Department of Medicine

Dear Colleagues:

I’m honored and humbled to accept Dean King’s offer to become the ninth chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine. Despite spending my entire career at UCSF, the past year as interim chair has given me the opportunity to deepen my knowledge and appreciation of this magnificent department. It’s a great privilege to have the chance to lead it.

While I have thoughts about some of the things we need to do, I also know that the best ideas will come from you – our faculty, staff, and trainees. So I’ll continue to spend a lot of my time listening. What excites you about your work? What are your concerns? What can I – and our divisions and department – do to make it easier for you to do your job, and to keep you engaged and excited? I see my role as chair as helping to set our strategic direction and – more importantly – creating an environment in which we attract, retain, and support the most accomplished, most interesting, most dynamic, and most diverse people.

Ours is among the finest departments of medicine in the country. Our people are outstanding and our accomplishments – in clinical care, research, education, service, and policy – are legion. We are in good shape financially, good enough that we can afford to be a bit more ambitious, a little bolder, and even take a few risks. We work at terrific healthcare delivery organizations, in one of the world’s great cities and regions. We have extraordinarily generous donors who believe in what we do. We are very fortunate.

Yet we find ourselves at a moment when our storied history actually poses risks, since it would be easy for us to hunker down and not make crucial but difficult changes. As the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once said, “Don’t be humble. You’re not that great.” We are pretty great, but we need to remain humble – celebrating our past and preserving what works, while being open to change, perhaps even major change, in order to continue to lead and prosper.

Why? Because we live in an era of tightening clinical and research funding and new pressures to deliver value to patients and purchasers. Our work is increasingly complex and the time pressures we face are daunting. We need to learn how to manage new partnerships, to thrive in a healthcare world turned digital, and to promote collegiality on a campus growing ever more geographically dispersed. We have an increasingly diverse workforce and patient population, and we are located in a very expensive place to live. With all of these forces, it seems unlikely that doing things exactly the way we’ve always done them is the right answer. Change can seem risky, but, given today’s challenges, I believe stagnation is riskier.

My job is to support all of you as, together, we make UCSF and our department even more outstanding – for our patients, our trainees, our faculty, our staff, and all the people and organizations who look to us as a beacon of excellence and innovation. Thank you for your support as we embark on this exciting journey. Let’s figure out how to do even greater things, to make more of a difference, to support each other tirelessly, and to have some fun while we’re at it. I know we can.

Robert Wachter, MD
Chair, Department of Medicine