I'm going to talk a little bit about the importance of teamwork and mentoring in all areas and aspects of quality improvement. I happen to be the one up here giving the slides, talking on this course, and presenting our data. But I'm certainly not the only one who's done all this work. If you've been watching the rest of this course you'll see that many of the projects that I've presented from our group, I'm not the first author on. We work together as a great group. And we as a group, VTE Quality Improvement Collaborative, recently won the CDC Healthcare-Associated VTE Prevention Challenge Champions. And if you want to hear about our story as a group, I'd recommend you read this paper, it's our multidisciplinary approach to achieve perfect prophylaxis for VTE. And it's written by me and a bunch of my co-authors. And we've been working on this work for literally over a decade together some of us. I've got a huge supportive group of collaborators within the VTE Collaborative. I've mentioned many of them already, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, research fellows, post-doctoral residents, et cetera, it's a great group to work with. Tons and tons of support from the Armstrong Institute. I really appreciate specifically the work and the help that Dr. Pronovost has given us over at least the last decade. We've collaborated with numerous other departments. I'm a trauma surgeon so in my division of Acute Care Surgery, we're clearly doing this work. But we've also worked with other divisions, colorectal, hepatobiliary, surgical oncology, vascular, as well as other departments on projects both published research, as well as quality improvement within the hospital in orthopedics, neurosurgery, urology. We have tons of trainees that work with us, and the trainees are really the lifeblood of our work. Over the past 10 years, we've had literally dozens of trainees of all different types working with our group on lots and lots of different projects. We've had at least 10 different master's capstone projects, numerous research fellows, both clinical and research fellows, resident, students, postdocs, pharmacists who've spent dedicated time with their research group. We've had surgery residents, acute care surgery fellows, residents, pharmacists, students, lots of different people. From the School of Public Health, numerous people like I said who have worked on their Capstone projects worked with us for a year. Faculty, the Biostatistics Consulting Center, we've had blinded by our statisticians who worked on projects with us. I've even collaborated with the current dean, Dr. MacKenzie, as well as the Evidence Based Practice Center on VTE prevention. We have lots of different collaborators, you can't do this work in a silo, you can't do it by yourself, you can't do it as just one doctor being all by yourself. One of my other hats is as a mentor to Master's students not in the realm of venous thromboembolism prevention, but in public health and research and surgery in general. And we publish a paper with the group at JSCOR, the Johns Hopkins Surgery Center for Surgical Outcomes Research. And our mission is to do multidisciplinary research, and educate the future people, the future researchers in outcomes research, and quality and safety. We over the past five years, we published this data, had 90 master's students we matched with 44 surgical faculty, who published over 200 peer review papers including one in JAMA. This is what we do, we mentor the next generation. This is me, my group, some of the mentors, and leadership from the Dean of the School of Medicine, the Dean of the School of Public Health, the Director of the MPH Program, and my boss the Chair of Surgery, all supporting this program. Mentoring is what we do and we focus on it. It's important to do in the realm of quality and safety as well. And further acknowledgements. I put these pictures up here not because they're the only individuals who have helped, but they cover every aspect of what we do. It is literally the Surgeon General, who put out the Surgeon General's report and the call to action for VTE. It's the Dean of the Medical School, it's Peter Pronovost, one of the most prolific quality and safety researchers. It's my group, it's physicians, pharmacists, nurses, it's visiting professors we've dealt with, it's [inaudible] staff, it's patients. And the one picture in the more casual outfits, is us. My research team went to a patient advocacy walk for blood clot prevention and we met a lot of blood clot PEDVT survivors. And people were out there raising money for more research and education on this important topic. And this is why we do what we do for the patients.
