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Over the past several weeks, I have had the privilege of connecting with faculty, staff and trainees from across the UCLA Department of Medicine (DoM). Through our Department of Medicine Professional Group (DMPG) Annual Meeting, five community meetings held from North Los Angeles to the South Bay, and our Internal Medicine Fall Conference, we have created opportunities to share our collective progress, discuss challenges and hear directly from you who are advancing our department’s missions each day.

Although each gathering had a distinct purpose and audience, I was struck by a common thread throughout these conversations, which is that we must continue to invest in the environment and resources that are essential to ensure that our faculty, trainees and staff can succeed and thrive.

Our strategic plan identifies building community as the foundation for everything we hope to accomplish across patient care, research, education, and community engagement and investment. These recent conversations have been an important expression of that commitment. They have allowed us not only to communicate where the department is headed, but also to hear directly from our community about what is working well, where challenges remain and how we can best support our people’s success.

Reflecting on Our Progress at the DMPG Annual Meeting

Our DMPG Annual Meeting gave us an opportunity to step back and consider the department as a whole, including how we have grown, where we are making progress, where pressures remain and how our strategic plan is guiding our investments.

We began by welcoming new faculty and leaders to our community and recognizing colleagues whose accomplishments reflect the remarkable breadth of work taking place across the department. The continued growth of our faculty, clinical programs and academic activities is impressive, but growth alone is not our objective.

We want to ensure that our expansion strengthens the quality, consistency and impact of our work and that the systems surrounding our people allow them to do that work successfully. Across our clinical mission, we continue to evaluate how to sustainably increase access to care provided by UCLA Department of Medicine faculty, in both ambulatory and inpatient settings.

At the same time, we are working to improve the operational systems that influence the daily experiences of our patients and care teams. These efforts include improving patient access and hospital throughput, creating greater consistency across ambulatory workflows, and addressing the volume and management of InBasket messages.

We have also continued to invest in the academic and professional growth of our faculty. That work includes strengthening mentorship and faculty development through our DoM Office of Faculty Advancement, Development and Mentorship (FAME), expanding avenues for scholarship and creating ways for faculty contributions across clinical care, education and community engagement to be documented and recognized in our department journals; Proceedings of the UCLA Department of Medicine and UCLA Department of Medicine Clinical Insights. Our goal is to support the many ways our faculty create knowledge, improve care, educate others and serve our communities, even when those contributions do not always follow traditional academic pathways.

Our research community continues to demonstrate extraordinary resilience and ambition in a challenging external environment. Faculty are submitting more grant applications, the department has increased its overall research funding, and we have maintained our federal National Institutes of Health (NIH) support despite considerable uncertainty. To achieve that our faculty are submitting many more proposals, and I want to acknowledge the tremendous effort of our faculty that have resulted in these successes. We are strengthening infrastructure to help investigators move their work forward, including support for clinical trials and other resources intended to connect faculty with opportunities, collaborators and expertise.

Community engagement and investment remain equally central to our strategy. Our partnerships with federally qualified health centers and other community-based organizations allow department of medicine faculty to bring needed services into communities across Los Angeles. Approximately 50 faculty have elected to spend a significant portion of their time working in federally qualified health centers through this model. By supporting participating faculty, the department is working to ensure that service in these settings does not come at a financial disadvantage to them. This approach reflects our responsibility and commitment to listen to our community partners, understand where needs exist and determine how our expertise can help address them.

There is much to celebrate in this progress report. But our meetings should not simply be an accounting of accomplishments. They must also give us an opportunity to be candid about the experience of our people.

Our 2026 wellness survey showed that overall faculty burnout has declined from 60 percent in 2022 to approximately 47 percent. That movement is encouraging, but 47, which hovers around the national average, is a percent that remains far too high. The data also remind us that there is no single faculty experience. Burnout varies across divisions, locations and groups, and the survey highlighted concerns related to staffing and administrative support, productivity expectations, compensation, workload, time away, InBasket and patient-message burden, transparency and communication, and support for academic and research careers. Our responsibility is not simply to identify these challenges. We must act on what we learn and create the conditions in which our faculty, trainees and staff will succeed and thrive.

The work underway across clinical operations, faculty development, research infrastructure, mentorship, communications and community partnership reflects that obligation. Some concerns require department-wide solutions, while others must be understood and addressed within individual divisions, locations or faculty communities. Both approaches are necessary.

I also announced some changes to our leave of absence policies as they relate to our tier incentive program and changes to simplify the calculation of productivity-linked compensation. Please stay tuned for more details that will be shared in future webinars and division-specific outreach.

Taking the Conversation to Our Communities: 2026 DoM Faculty Community Meetings

We held a total of five meetings spanning North Los Angeles to the South Bay. Going out to our communities gave us the opportunity to speak with faculty closer to where they practice and conduct research, hear how departmental priorities are translating into their daily work and better understand where additional attention is needed.

We also tailored these conversations for clinicians and researchers because, although they belong to one department and share many concerns, their experiences and the resources they need are not always the same.

For our clinical faculty, the conversations focused heavily on the systems and workflows that shape their daily experience of caring for patients. We discussed clinical growth, patient access, hospital throughput, staffing, ambulatory workflow consistency, and the burden created by InBasket and patient-message volume. We also discussed faculty wellness, retention, compensation and the importance of recognizing the full range of work performed by clinical faculty.

We know that the InBasket is a significant source of frustration and administrative burden. Faculty and staff feedback has shown that high message volume, inconsistent processes and unclear ownership can cause work to be directed to physicians even when it could be handled safely and effectively by another member of the care team.

In response, the department is moving forward with work to establish clearer message-routing standards, more consistent role ownership, structured intake processes and physician-led guidelines, as described above. The objective is not simply to move messages from one person to another. It is to ensure that each request reaches the appropriate member of the team, routine matters are resolved efficiently, and physicians can focus their time and expertise on the issues that require clinical judgment.

We are taking a similar approach to ambulatory operations more broadly. Variation in pre-visit planning, rooming and after-visit processes can create inefficiency for faculty and staff and an inconsistent experience for patients. The work underway to establish clearer, more consistent workflows is intended to give teams a more reliable operational foundation while preserving the flexibility needed to care for different patient populations.

These changes will not happen through policies alone. They require the perspectives of the physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses, medical assistants, administrative staff and operational leaders who understand where processes break down and what workable solutions look like. The community meetings created another opportunity to hear those perspectives and connect them with the department-wide work already moving forward.

Our research-focused conversations addressed a different set of pressures. We are operating in a challenging and constantly changing federal funding and policy environment, and investigators are understandably concerned about how that uncertainty could affect their laboratories, teams, scientific programs and career development.

The department is responding by closely tracking federal grant submissions and outcomes, including review timelines, impact scores and funding decisions. This will help us better understand emerging patterns and determine where additional support or advocacy may be needed. We are also continuing to strengthen the Clinical Trials Program and other research infrastructure intended to help investigators develop, launch and advance their work. Supporting research success also requires attention to the full faculty experience. The researcher community meetings highlighted efforts involving faculty onboarding, early-career engagement, mentorship, professional development and research communications.

Our weekly research updates, web resources and research impact stories are part of a broader effort to help faculty find resources, understand changes in the funding landscape, identify opportunities and connect with one another. Researcher wellness deserves the same focused attention.

Faculty have identified funding stress, clinical responsibilities and the availability of administrative and research support as important influences on their wellbeing. Strengthening mentorship, improving access to infrastructure, and creating clearer connections to information and resources will not eliminate every external pressure, but represent practical ways the department can help faculty navigate them. We will continue to identify and implement new tools to enhance support for our research faculty.

Across both the clinician and researcher meetings, we also discussed faculty development and the importance of ensuring that people can envision a successful future within the department. Compensation, career advancement, recognition, mentorship, operational support and a sense of belonging are not separate from our strategy. They determine whether our people have the capacity and support to advance it.

What I valued most about the five meetings was the opportunity for dialogue. Presenting information is important, but listening to the questions that follow often tells us where greater clarity is needed, where an initiative may not yet be having its intended effect or where an experience differs across communities. A strategic plan is meaningful only if the people it is meant to support can see themselves in it.

Stepping Away to Reflect, Learn and Build a Boat: 2026 IM Fall Conference

Our Internal Medicine Fall Conference brought another essential community into these conversations. Our residents.

The conference offered residents across different stages of training the opportunity to step away from their usual clinical routines and focus on reflection, development and connection. The day included class-specific programming on succeeding in residency, feedback and evaluations, and financial literacy. Residents also heard updates from the VA and the residency program, participated in rotation feedback and improvement sessions, and received an introduction to specific available pathways in medical education, health systems and management, global health, health equity and advocacy, research, and hospital medicine.

I particularly enjoyed welcoming our newest interns in person and recognizing residents who are stepping into new levels of responsibility. With three months behind them, our interns may not be ready to declare themselves experts just yet, but they are well on their way. Our new senior residents are likewise learning how to lead their teams, support their colleagues and manage the additional responsibilities that come with this next chapter of training.

I wanted our residents to understand the scale and breadth of the department they are part of, but more importantly, the opportunities that come with being part of it. They are not here simply to complete residency or pass their boards. They are training in an environment that can connect them with opportunities across patient care, research, education and community engagement. My hope is that they use that environment to discover where they can make the greatest difference and leave UCLA prepared to lead and shape the future of medicine.

The conference also exemplified the kind of listening we want to practice across the department. Program leaders gather resident feedback throughout the year, work with residents and faculty on possible improvements, and return to the community with updates and unresolved questions. The rotation feedback and improvement sessions gave residents a direct role in considering how the training environment can continue to evolve. That approach matters. Our trainees are often the people closest to the day-to-day realities of our clinical services. Their observations can help identify where processes create unnecessary burden, where learning experiences are inconsistent and where changes could improve both education and patient care. Supporting residents means helping them develop as physicians and leaders while also ensuring that their training environment remains responsive to what they are experiencing.

Fortunately, the day was not limited to presentations and working sessions.

For the team-building activity, residents received an assortment of seemingly random materials and a deceptively simple assignment. They had to build a boat capable of carrying one of their teammates across the UCLA pool.

When I learned what they were planning, I spent more time than I should probably admit wondering whether I could rearrange my schedule to join them. I even arrived prepared with what I considered an innovative solution for getting onto the water. Whether this demonstrated creativity, questionable judgment or an excessive commitment to team building is best left for the residents to decide.

What I can say with certainty is that these experiences matter. Residency is demanding. Creating opportunities for residents to step away from their normal routines, laugh together, learn from one another, offer honest feedback and strengthen relationships is an important part of building a program in which people can thrive.

Continuing the Conversation

Taken together, these recent gatherings have reminded me of the breadth and interconnectedness of our department.

At DMPG, we considered our direction as a department and the progress and challenges we see across our strategic plan. Through five community meetings, we connected more directly with clinicians and researchers across our locations, and discussed how departmental priorities intersect with their daily work. At the Internal Medicine Fall Conference, we spent time with residents who are not only learning within our department today but will help lead medicine in the years ahead.

The details of these conversations differed, but the underlying responsibility was the same. We must listen carefully, communicate candidly and act on what we learn so that our faculty, trainees and staff are positioned to succeed.

Later this week, we will extend that engagement through the DoM for LA Summit, a major initiative supporting our community engagement and investment mission. This next gathering will provide another opportunity to consider how the department of medicine can work with partners across UCLA and Los Angeles to advance health in the communities we serve.

I look forward to sharing more about that work. For now, I am grateful to everyone who participated in these recent gatherings, shared ideas, raised difficult questions and helped us think more carefully about the department we are building together. Our strategy gives us direction, but it is the insight, expertise and commitment of our people that move us forward.

Dale

P.S.

One of my favorite meetings of the year is having lunch with our chief residents early in their tenure. I can say with confidence, that our program is in excellent hands!

The Z-Pack Chief Residents (left to right): Drs. Abhinav Thummala, Esther Kim, Will Stringer, Katya Lavine, me, Tyler Morad, Harveen Sekhon, Sneha Sharma, Allie Kaufman. Not pictured: Drs. Jeemin Kwon and Nancy Miles.

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