Dean's Message

December 2, 2021

Extensive work went into the creation of the CoM’s inaugural five-year strategic plan, released in 2017. The collaborative process was a first for us, and was highly successful in engaging so many—across our entire college and from stakeholder and partner organizations—to articulate the plan. Our 2017-2022 plan has served us well, and we have made progress in several key areas, specifically: we’re seeing strength in those foundations of faculty engagement and enablers, and in our research deliverables, and with all of our education programs fully accredited.

As we renew that plan to take us to 2025, which aligns with the university’s planning timeline, college leadership have acknowledged and agreed that much of the original content remains relevant to our ongoing strategic planning approach. With that in mind, we have updated the plan with small but significant changes in its content, to guide our work over the next three to four years. You can see this updated information reflected on the college’s strategic plan webpage. Here, I will highlight some of what has changed in this updated plan.

While the pillars on which we all work continue, as always, to be education and research, we are more concretely identifying the critical role of our social obligations in truly achieving success. The areas of our social obligations we have identified in the renewed plan encompass: Indigenous health; equity, diversity and anti-racism; social accountability; and growth and stability of Saskatchewan’s rural and remote physician workforce.

As we head into 2022, our context has changed, and we need to focus and carry out work in these areas, and respond to what our society needs from us—not only through the lens of a post-pandemic world and our role in helping meet Saskatchewan’s healthcare workforce needs, but through our acknowledgement as a college and society that we can’t claim success or achievement when we leave whole segments of people out and do them harm.

The leadership team of our college agrees that more concrete and intentional planning is needed to ensure we meet our important social obligations as Saskatchewan’s only medical school.

What hasn’t changed, is that our faculty, staff and learners—our team—is the foundation from which we will achieve success in these areas, as well as across our strategic directions. We have reduced the total number of strategic directions – our top priorities – from nine to seven. Those strategic priorities are: Strengthen Research Capacity; Quality Education; Social Accountability; Indigenous Health; Faculty Engagement; School of Rehabilitation Science; and Enablers. Two of the original priority areas—Distributed Medical Education and Health System Alignment—are positioned within Quality Education and Faculty Engagement, respectively, in the renewed plan. This approach enhances our strong commitment to our top priorities and will help us work together to achieve the best outcomes for our college.

A huge number of our faculty, learners and staff, as well as many members of partner organizations, helped us create our original plan, launched in 2017. That work, and the more recent work to renew the plan, has our college on solid footing as we head towards 2025. Thank you, team!

I hope you will take a few minutes to look through the updated strategic plan web page.

Preston Smith
Dean