In January of 2022, a webinar from the Kern National Network for Caring and Character in Medicine featured three speakers from the Dell Med community: Larry Speck, Sue Cox, M.D., and Zack Timmons, M.D. Speck, a distinguished teaching professor in UT’s School of Architecture whose design work is seen across the Dell Med campus, moderated a discussion between Cox — professor emeritus in Dell Med’s Department of Medical Education and the former executive vice dean of academics — and Timmons, a Dell Med Class of 2021 graduate and co-founder of Good Apple. Together, they provided inspiration for considering how Dell Med’s human-centered spaces, curricula and engagement approaches can affect flourishing within our community.
This event kicked off the first session of the Kern National Network’s “Human Flourishing 2030” discussion series. Throughout this series, sessions explore what it will take over the next decade to achieve a healthier future where health care learners, practitioners and patients flourish. The series examines how characteristics of communities, organizations and other settings affect those within, as well as ways to support flourishing in those surroundings.
The next session in the series — Flourishing 2030: “Creating Organizational Cultures of Flourishing” — will take place at on Tuesday, April 26, 2022. Leaders will discuss the unique organizational cultures at the Mayo Clinic, Ascension Seton and the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and they will explore how these organizations developed as well as the ways they contribute to thriving among learners, practitioners and patients.