Well, that was a pretty eventful twelve months, wasn’t it? Whether you are reading this as the clock runs out on 2024 or in the opening hours just inside 2025, I appreciate you taking the time to accept my good wishes for a happy new year. Thanks to all our clinicians and staff who worked during the last couple weeks as our work for caring for patients and mentoring trainees continued.
That sacrifice of time and effort for others is evidence of your commitment to our community. Like I said a couple weeks ago in the update of my first 80 days at Iowa, the ongoing project of the coming year will be for each of us to find those opportunities where our expertise and our input can take our community beyond what is expected of us. Each of us has a set of unique insights, ideas, and talents that are not just welcome but necessary. That will mean stepping up into leadership roles, whether it is one of the new vice chair positions recently announced or something with our residency program or at the division level. Maybe a question for further research or about how to do something more efficiently in your clinic has been nagging at you. This is it. This is the year to ask those questions, to step up, to grow into what your community needs you to be.
And for those who are already in leadership roles, I want to challenge you to make the room for new leaders and for their questions to get asked. Maybe it’s reserving five minutes at the end of a meeting to extend an extra measure of curiosity in what your team members are thinking, seeing, or hearing. We have to greet those questions not as challenges but as chances to grow and as chances to prove that we trust in each other. We can show our colleagues that we value everyone’s insights and creativity. Suggestions for improvement spring from a place of generosity and a shared desire to improve how we work. We repay that generosity with trust and an openness to input. Trust will be the foundation for this new, more integrated and dynamic community that we build together in 2025. No bad ideas, only untested ones.
I have to share a photo to illustrate what I mean. I took this photo almost exactly five years ago to the day in Antelope Island State Park. That is my son standing at the edge of a dock looking out over Utah’s Great Salt Lake. I like that at first glance he seems to be hovering between the water and the sky, pulling off something impossible. But in fact, there is infrastructure supporting him as he appreciates the view, hopefully thinking about the lack of limits on what is in front of him and what he can do. I want us to remember that too, that more than a century and a half of foundation from this institution will hold us up while we imagine where University of Iowa Health Care and this department can go.
Finally, as we count down to 2025 later tonight, I hope you see yourself reflected in this short montage of moments from 2024. Think about what your colleagues mean to you and you mean to them. May we all have a chance to show and be shown the same in the New Year to come.
May good health, joy, and peace surround you and your loved ones. Happy New Year!
