U-Turn with an Aircraft Carrier

Walk with me through this metaphor (if you stick around, you will see that I live and breathe in visuals, analogies, and metaphors; they're incredibly effective for teaching and learning).

Imagine you're in a boat on a lake, all by yourself. This isn't a rowboat; this is a speedboat. You can do whatever you want in that thing. You can go as fast as you want, you can turn on a dime. The beauty of having something small and agile like a speedboat (or maybe like a motorcycle compared to a crew-cab dually F350) is that you can make turns fast. You can swerve quickly; you're maneuverable.

In the business world, one might say you can "pivot" quickly.

Now, picture academia. Picture the ivory tower, the large campus, the layers of administration, the committees, the staff, the faculty, the students, the student government associations, the campus rec, the overhead, the funding, the insurance, the maintenance/campus management......all the "things".

Now imagine trying to make a turn to "pivot" with an institution this large, with this much infrastructure, and with this much management of overhead. One of my former colleagues and friends (a president of numerous small colleges) told me one time: "Making change at the college level is like making a U-turn with an aircraft carrier. It definitely is not fast."

THIS is why this blog is called "View from an Aircraft Carrier".

What we are about to do here at Landmark will not be easy (though it might be quicker than you expect). First, let me explain what I mean by "what we are about to do here".

It all starts with the problems. Not the problems I see, but the problems that the entire industries of healthcare and healthcare education see.

1) An unstable workforce

2) Burnout (see #1)

3) Excessive student loan debt that buries clinicians (see #1)

4) Academic fluff: this means excessive courses to take, and too many people on the payroll which leads to excessive costs (see #3)

5) Underprepared entry-level clinicians, which leads to extensive time to "spin-up" a new grad clinician (which means less revenue generation due to decreased efficiency)

6) Increasing costs to providers and health systems because of high-turnover, HR costs, upskilling, etc.

What we are about to do here is solve each of these problems.

How?

By creating a rigorous, intentional academic infrastructure that leverages accreditation, timing, and specific partnerships to produce a university that can produce a highly-skilled clinician who will

1) keep their job

2) not burnout

3) likely have less than 1/2 of the student loan debt of a typical allied health graduate professional

4) have less fluff

5) have more educational content taught in the BS degree plan by the same clinicians they will see in their professional program

6) create a more stable and financially sound healthcare workforce by creating clinicians who are not only better at their jobs (linked to job satisfaction) but also will stay in their role rather than "job-hopping" (which costs clinics and health systems hundreds of thousands of dollars a year)

Want to know more? Stay tuned. As we move through this process of development, every step will be shared.