Leadership - An Enduring Mission

A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not the purpose of a ship.
~Winston Churchill

October 2024 | Vol. 68, No. 1
Written by Silvia Ferretti, DO

To recognize the newly reimagined and redesigned digital Pennsylvania Osteopathic Medical Association (POMA) Journal, the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine (LECOM) offers a special piece highlighting LEADERSHIP, a quality that endures through reimaginings and redesigns; always pertinent, always necessary, and always an attribute of all that is LECOM.

As an integral part of the Pennsylvania osteopathic medical community, and in serving for a higher good, the mission is the roadmap to success. That enduring mission is rooted in an unshakable commitment to leadership.

When the Board of Trustees of Millcreek Community Hospital founded the LECOM in the early 1990s, it became the 16th college of osteopathic medicine in the nation. Since that time, the determined efforts of faculty, staff, and students alike have propelled LECOM to its place as the largest educational institution of its kind.

LECOM educates osteopathic physicians, pharmacists, dentists, and podiatrists to practice medicine upon a higher level, embodying the credo not for ourselves, but for others. It inculcates the values of inclusive leadership excellence - not solely in educational training, but in community service and through awareness of the human condition. Not only is LECOM a leader in education, but the College and LECOM Health are partners in providing for the health care needs of the Erie community. LECOM has demonstrated an unwavering and resolute commitment to all of the communities in which it has come to lay its cornerstone.

Noting the first rate schools of healthcare education providing superlative medical training in Erie and Greensburg, Pennsylvania and in Bradenton, Florida and Elmira, New York – the tremendous growth of LECOM is one of the top entrepreneurial success stories in the nation.

To what can we attribute this success? In a word – Leadership. Thus, as an essential principle of the calling of medicine, this segment highlights this key attribute.

Leadership consists of many characteristics: integrity, self-discipline, purpose, preparedness, common- sense, adaptability, and compassion to name a few. Leaders are not born; they are made - through hard work, through sacrifice, through determination. LECOM students have led the way in medical treatment and care to the suffering in the tattered villages of Haiti and Jamaica, and in the shadows of the inner-cities right here in the United States.

LECOM stands stalwartly in the vanguard of promoting wellness for the communities that it touches.

The principle of leadership has brought LECOM to generously support organizations such as clinics to treat the homeless in Florida and countless outreach programs that work in the areas of health and wellness across the four campus locations. The LECOM Dental clinic proudly serves indigent groups across the spectrum of humanity.

Through the joint leadership of staff and students, the annual LECOM Auction Gala and Dinner raises significant sums annually to aid students in attending medical school. The leadership cycle continues as the students raise thousands of dollars each year by participating in the fundraising efforts of many health service organizations such as the Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Heart, Diabetes, and other associations.

Leadership is taught by example, a tenet honed by the LECOM President. Leadership begets leadership.

Performance has long been the key to successful leadership as students, faculty, and LECOM physicians bear out a community service-focus that directs the footsteps of the LECOM progeny.

People who allow events and circumstances to dictate their lives are not leaders - rather, they live reactively. LECOM is proud of its faculty, staff, and students who lead and who live actively. Leaders inspire others to grow in responsibility and in skills - learning limits by exceeding them and by adopting the concept of continuous improvement as a daily principle.

Leadership is not a one-day activity; rather it is a constant commitment to excellence - a habit and a daily practice.

Leadership requires adaptability. During the Covid pandemic, LECOM navigated the rules and regulations of three separate states. LECOM leadership facilitated the ability of the schools to remain open and for medical education to continue uninterrupted.

In this uncertain time of turmoil and economic strife, it is important to challenge oneself to lead all the days of one’s life. Half-heartedness never won a battle.

The noble principle of leadership is the code of practice that each student finds honed through protracted hours of study and through tireless determination of single-minded purpose; the awareness that to be able to lead others, one often must be willing to go forward alone; the realization that leaders do not wait - they shape their own frontiers, seeing challenge as opportunity rather than impediment.

Recalling the humble beginnings of LECOM, as a once wistful idea that crossed the minds of a few dreamers as they envisaged the future, one can see that all who have accomplished purposeful victories have held a high aim, have fixed their gaze upon a goal which was towering, one which sometimes seemed impossible - for this is the code of leadership, this is the mission of LECOM, and this is the heart of LECOM scholars.