We were just noticing that Mom was not her vibrant self, she wasn't taking her
medications, she got confused how to fill up her pill boxes.
Every day is a little piece of me and Mom that gets lost.
For every major chronic disease like Alzheimer's we're faced with a race
against time.
I'm fairly certain I'm going to get this disease.
I feel still a little bit scared
Gene Renton and her family as well as countless other patients that we look
after with the Hopkins Model of Care for Dementia benefit from the sort of brain
thrust that we have available. I'm especially proud at Hopkins how we've
stepped up to the plate to deal with Alzheimer's as the sort of disease that
requires people from different specialties, physicians, basic scientists,
nurses, etcetera working together to bring the advances of tomorrow.
Well in the late 1880s if you were a medical student there were no admissions
requirements except that you had to pay a fee to the professor/doctor owner of the
proprietary school.
Once you took all the courses and you'd finished paying your fees you graduated
and you were a doctor. Medical education and medical practice
really weren't regulated at that time.
You can imagine that that didn't bode well for most patients.
What a remarkable vision and what a remarkable gift.
Seven million dollars in those days was a huge sum of money.
Johns Hopkins had a really unique vision, a vision in which the medical school
and hospital could work together to help train doctors and was really a pioneer in
ensuring that this type of medical training would occur in the country.
That $7 million gift really changed everything. It set up a new model for how to bring
together teaching, clinical care, and research and really establish a paradigm
for the country going forward.
This was a critical time.
The vision in which a physician would not only train at the bedside but in the
laboratory was very unique thus Hopkins led the way in having physicians go from
the bench to the bedside and help train clinician scientists.
Physicians on the faculty were making discoveries in the morning and teaching
about them to their students in the afternoon.
And their students would rotate from the laboratory to the bedside and back and forth.
They would spend some time in classroom but the important activity was either in
the laboratory or at the bedside with the patients.
Flexner's Report recommended that the
Hopkins model if you will become the model for American Medical Education and in fact
led to a change in the way we're doing things.
What binds this family, this Hopkins family together is really patient-oriented
research, the shared goal of trying to do something new and important for patients.
The patient is the first teacher for every physician.
What we learned from all of them really goes back into our bench.
In our bench we start understanding how are we going to make it better for them
and we bring different ideas back to the bedside and in the long term that's how
advances are going to really happen.
So research isn't done by one person sitting in a lab or sitting in office
thinking of things. It's done by people really talking to
each other and coming up with different ideas and it's very, very collaborative.
And the best new ideas really come from the interface when people talk to each
other coming from different perspectives
and that's something that we have a lot of at Hopkins.
In addition to having some of the premier scientists in the world here we are
extraordinarily enriched for people who want to make an impact in that field.
We work hard, we collaborate vigorously, and we make great discoveries.
The other reason to be at Johns Hopkins
is that you have this incredible opportunity
to train the next leaders of your specialty.
The ability to take what you do and show your residents how to do an operation or
a procedure is a thrill. It's a thrill.
Johns Hopkins was a man who was committed to the care of underserved patients
and people who belonged to disadvantaged backgrounds so I think it is very
interesting that 100 years later that here I am trying to sort of forge a new path
and a renewed interest in understanding the reasons for those differences in
health and those differences in access to care and quality of care and developing solutions.
Well it feels natural to me because it sort of this extension of the vision of
Mr. Hopkins and the early trustees that we should not only promote new discovery but
then share that with humankind.
From an impact perspective the fact that we can be out in the world, work side by
side with local healthcare providers, local governments to improve their
healthcare delivery that is orders of magnitude greater impact to be able to
work in those communities because not everybody can come here and experience it firsthand.
A building is not some sort of abstract kind of notion, a building is there to
serve people in my view and the particular group of people of course are the patients
and their families.
And the environment that I believe needs to be created around them is one in which
you can point to elements of the environment that promote healing.
I think networks of hospitals and community health centers working together
to solve important problems will essentially be the future of Johns Hopkins medicine.
We're experiencing an important shift I think from managing illness to managing health.
We've become good at seeing issues and patterns in groups of patients,
patient populations, and the result is improved strategies for prevention and for intervention.
If I had a wish for the future it would be that we're called Johns Hopkins Health
and that we worry about the health of the communities we serve.
It's about taking care of those people.
If we catch it early there are so many things that you can do to preserve the
memories that you have, to get in touch with people for making plans and kind of
using road.
The challenge we face every day is balancing a race for the cure with
providing the best care that we can right now for the people and their families who
face it right now and who aren't going to benefit from the cure when it comes.
I think that there is definitely hope down there not for my age group necessarily but
certainly for my children and my grandchildren and so I don't want them to
have to go through this if that's at all possible.
People come here for a variety of reasons
but they stay here primarily to be a part of something special, to contribute to our
history of leading in American medicine and extend that into the future where
we're still trying to make a difference in everything that we do.
There's a coming home here and it's a great home to be a part of.
You come to Hopkins because you can accomplish something here that matters in
your life. There's a mission, a purpose, a living
for the intellectual challenge of it,
and the emotional reward of doing well.
We all know we're working towards something that's bigger than ourselves.
We see it in the patients, we see it each time we publish a paper with new
knowledge, and we look towards the future
and that I think is really what drives us all.