When writing to alumni to announce the cancellation of Reunion Week, Dean George Q. Daley, MD ’91, neatly summed up recent transformations at HMS.
“This pandemic has forced us to make a world of change in just a matter of days.”
Yet those changes, as encompassing as they are, have not stopped the work of the School. Medical education continues with students taking classes online and participating in a growing number of virtual clerkships being rolled out or developed. Advocacy among our MD candidates has spiked. Understandably, most of it has been focused on projects related to COVID-19 that are taking root in the Boston area. But students who are dispersed throughout the nation also are tackling the health care inequities facing vulnerable populations, inequities that have only been growing during this pandemic.
The number of graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and staff in the School’s scientific enterprise decreased significantly by a ramp-down of research operations. Knowing that certain operations, such as essential experiments and animal care, would need to continue, HMS leadership established a way for department chairs, working with heads of their laboratories, to identify key individuals who would perform these functions if approved to do so. Petitions were reviewed and decided upon by a committee led by the dean. The process brought abrupt, heartbreaking endings to many multiyear experiments, yet the research community met the challenge and ramped down effectively and efficiently, helping to ensure the safety and health of all.
The School’s vast alumni community is serving in countless ways. Some have come out of retirement to deliver care in hospitals or remotely; many were already in hospitals, caring for patients with the disease. Others have been making personal protective equipment or conducting clinical research on the disease. Still others are serving on COVID-19 advisory groups at the local or national level, holding town halls, formulating bioethical standards of care, developing mental health support tools for frontline health care personnel, or contributing their expertise in media interviews or online education series about the disease and its challenges for health care.
This spring, the world may have changed on campus, but the spirit of the people of HMS hasn’t.
“We all need to take a collective deep breath . . . We need to look forward and know that better days are ahead.”
—HMS DEAN GEORGE Q. DALEY, MD ’91, TOWN HALL ADDRESS, 04.10.20