MU School of Medicine Commencement to Honor 89 Graduates
Sir John Oldham, a knighted primary care physician, quality improvement expert, delivers address
Eighty-nine graduates, members of the MU School of Medicine Class of 2009, will officially become physicians during a 2:30 p.m. commencement ceremony on May 16 at Jesse Auditorium. Sir John Oldham, a leading international expert in the field of quality improvement, will give the commencement address.
Nearly 50 percent of the medical school graduating class will remain in Missouri to complete residency training. The number of graduating students staying at MU for their residencies has also increased over previous years – with 39 percent of 2009 graduates remaining at MU for residency.
“We’re extremely proud of the competent, patient-centered doctors that our students have become over the past four years,” said Linda Headrick, MD, senior associate dean for education and faculty development. “Their hard work and perseverance has paid off, and now we’re fortunate many of them have chosen to stay in Missouri and in MU residency programs.”
Oldham is a primary care physician who was knighted in 2003 for his service to the National Health System, the four publically funded health care systems in Great Britain. In 1997, the U.S. Institute for Healthcare Improvement invited Oldham to take part in a national project that used the breakthrough collaborative method – which unites teams from hospitals or clinics to seek improvement in a focused topic area. Oldham brought the collaborative method back to Great Britain, where he began forming collaborative teams with primary care providers.
In 2000, Oldham became the head of the National Primary Care Development Team, which manages the Primary Care Collaborative. The collaborative is now the largest improvement program in the world. It delivers impressive results, such as a 72 percent improvement in patients’ access to general practitioners, a substantial reduction in mortality for patients with coronary heart disease and improvement in other long-term illnesses.
At other ceremonies, 21 students received doctoral or master’s degrees from the departments of biochemistry, health management and informatics, molecular microbiology and immunology, medical pharmacology and physiology, and nutrition and exercise physiology.
