“The idea is to have a board that will be a
permanent fixture in helping us forecast the
future and assisting us through their personal
efforts and their relationships with others in
the community and the health-care professions,”
says SHRP dean Harold Jones, Ph.D.
“They’re helping us achieve the things we
need to do in order to stay out front.”
The board was started two years ago with a
“class” of eight members, and eight more were
added last year. By the end of this year, Jones
says a third class will have been added to bring
the board to a full complement of 20 to 25
members—all of them proven leaders in the
health-care industry or the community, and
all of them bringing the extensive experience and knowledge necessary to keep SHRP “out
in front of the field.”
“And to be out in front of the field in health
education means predicting the future of the
health-delivery environment, what it’s
going to be 10 or 15 years
down the road, so you need
people who are visionaries
themselves,” Jones
explains. “Sometimes
in academia, you’re
in the ‘ivory tower,’
and you’re predicting
from the ivory
tower what’s going to
be needed 10 years
from now. It’s a good
strategy to talk to the people
who are in the doing business and
ask them what the field’s going to be like in
10 years.”
One of those “doers” is Mike Garrigan,
M.S., who received his degree in hospital
administration from SHRP and is now the president and CEO of St. Francis Hospital in
Columbus, Georgia. Like the other members
of the board, Garrigan brings extensive experience
to the table—nearly three decades in
the field of health-care management—and
says he relishes the opportunity to use that
experience to SHRP’s advantage.
“There are many forces at work that influence
health care, and it’s not an easy field to
predict,” he says. “Obviously most of the perspective
we have for the future is based to a
great extent on what we’ve experienced in the
past—what trends, what observations we have
that are related to some of the things that
we’ve experienced previously.
“One of the things we have to learn in this
business is that we have to be adaptable, we have
to be willing to take on the challenge of change,”
Garrigan continues. “That’s also the challenge
that the dean and his program directors have set
at UAB—to try to have some understanding of
where we’re going and adapt to the changes.”
One of those changes is the much-talkedabout—
and growing—shortage in qualified
workers to staff the health professions. “The
board is particularly interested in what initiatives
the school might take to do a better job
of recruiting students into the professions and
placing them in need areas—not just what the
school can do, but how students can work
with us in engaging external communities,”
Jones says.
Garrigan describes SHRP
as already possessing
“top-flight faculty and
staff ” and strong
leadership, two reasons
why the school
has become such a
major player in its
field. The prestige and
expertise of the advisory
board demonstrates that
the school is serious about
maintaining that status.
“These people are known for being
forward thinkers,” Jones says. “They care about
our school, they care about our profession, and
they care about the things we’re doing.”