The Promise Coalition

The Promise Coalition represents a longitudinal partnership across the Departments of Surgery at the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, Stanford University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the Brigham and Woman’s Hospital of Harvard University. The Promise Coalition invests in each faculty and resident, recognizing that success is due to the talent, commitment, and vision of both groups. The Promise Coalition will support each individual to achieve their full professional and academic potential, and ensure that faculty and residents within our departments, and our community as a whole, realize our professional goals.

Our mission is to:

• Prepare each surgeon to achieve excellence in clinical care, research, and education.  

• Build a diverse and inclusive culture in which all individuals advance and thrive.

• Recruit the best and brightest clinicians and scientists to Surgery. 

• Create innovative strategies for ongoing professional growth and scientific discovery. 

• Develop the most talented and progressive leaders in academic medicine.

• Expand outreach and service to local, regional, national, and global partners.

Within these missions, these departments have created defined strategies to reach these goals, and each initiative is open to surgeons across rank, track, and specialty. The Promise Coalition is designed to accelerate achievement and ensure that our environment allows all individuals to achieve excellence and professional satisfaction. In addition, it is the goal of The Promise Coalition to act as institutional partners for multi-institutional interventional trials designed to measure and improve diversity, equity and inclusion. Because our faculty and residents play a central role in executing the mission of these departments of surgery, these efforts are integrated as a core value of equal importance to other core departmental values.

This goals of the Promise Coalition are based upon practices first developed at the University of Michigan, but are not meant to be static.  Rather, the programs are intended as starting points for programmatic development by our coalition. The Coalition, which is scheduled to be launched in spring, 2019 is supported by an institutional IRB application for work covered by these efforts, access to a REDCap database for use by Coalition partners, departmental and faculty level data sets, survey and interview instruments for measurement of implementation outcomes, and a timetable for the years following launch.

Stay tuned for developments!

Article by Michael Mulholland, MD, PhD (Twitter: @MWMulhollandMD)