College of Earth, Life, and Health Sciences

Initiative 4: Rising to meet Maine’s health care needs.

We seek to elevate the success and visibility of the college’s academic and scholarly programs in human health through objective-driven collaboration and coordination across programs and networking with other academic and private/public partners. We will develop a unified mission for our work in health sciences as a foundational step in pursuit of excellence in curriculum development and teaching, and to guide scholarly and research expansion in this area.

We will extend that collaborative mindset to exploring interdisciplinary efforts with natural science units in the college, health-related units at UMaine and University of Maine System (UMS), and potential partners in the health care industry. We will explore opportunities for interdisciplinary courses, new curricula and better coordination among academic units in all academic areas. We will strengthen relationships with our public and private partners in the health care and pursue creative mechanisms to meet our needs for clinical practice, other supervised practice, and create employment pipelines (e.g. internships). We will greatly increase the visibility of our human health programs via our communications initiative.

Our success with this initiative will help UMaine meet Maine’s growing demand for health care and health science professionals, elevate the quality of our academic programs relative to contemporary needs, and increase our scholarly contributions to health sciences and care.  We will be more competitive in today’s complex and dynamic marketplace of higher education in health fields, and our programs will be better positioned to respond to future UMaine and UMS workforce development initiatives.

Objectives:

• Develop a unified mission statement for human health sciences programs in the college.
• Expand graduate education programs at the Ph.D. level including an interdisciplinary Ph.D. option.
• Catalyze the growth of faculty research and scholarly activity including exploring opportunities for thematic initiatives on health issues (e.g., rural health care delivery) or more broadly across the college (e.g., Initiative for One Health and Environment) and UMaine.
• Strengthen our academic programs via collaboration such as developing an inter-professional practice course in human health, expanding experiential learning opportunities in team building and practice and making high interest courses available across curriculums.
• Explore new academic programs such as health systems management or public health.
• Explore creative partnerships with the private sector to meet our clinical practice needs and provide other opportunities for experiential learning or internships.