WENDY MOURADIAN: Thank you for your welcome and for your kind words, Martha. Leadership. Why do we do it? What does it look like? How do we train for it? And can we assess leadership training? These are the four questions that preoccupied us three years ago at the University of Washington when we applied for an MCH leadership training grant in pediatric dentistry, now known as LEPED. We knew that if we were fortunate enough to be funded, these would be among the first issues on our plate. Indeed, the prime motivation for our grant was the recognition of the profound need for leadership within pediatric dentistry. There are far too few pediatric dentists to provide care for all the children who need it, and their impact must be magnified. We also saw a great need for leadership within the rest of the health care system to address this important MCH disparities issue. Once funded, the P. I. of this grant, Dr. Penelope Leggett, Colleen Huebner, our MCH School of Public Health partner, and head of the training program in Maternal and Child Health, and later Jeff McLaughlin, and Greg Redding our lend and PPC directors, became enthused about a vision for a conference that would focus on cross-cutting leadership issues, and MCH leadership training. They shared the vision with us of getting us together to learn about each other. We've made the assumption that you all have the information for what leadership training in the MCH context looks like. And if there were going to be performance measures, we assume that you, like us, would like to have some input into how they're shaped and formed. But most importantly, we hope that this effort will make a significant contribution in our ways of thinking about and training for leadership in the Maternal and Child Health context for the 21st century.
So these became our goals. Defining leadership in the MCH context, which has something to do with why we do leadership, identifying the competencies, skills and domains that correspond to this leadership, identifying also the needed tools, curricula, and experiences that lead us and help us train to this outcome. Asking the question of how we measure our processes and outcomes, and finally, we hope and believe this will be an opportunity to network, share experiences, and collaborate with each other. And even though this is not a conference specifically geared towards intensive "how to" leadership competencies, we believe it will help us outline what should be those competencies, and the same time, we believe you will all learn deeply from each other about leadership in the process. The target audience for his program is primarily the MCH leadership training programs because we wanted to keep it small enough to be a working conference. And we have some involvement. We are grateful and appreciative of local, state, and national leaders, both federal and other, who are contributing to our dialogue. But by and large, this conference is made up of your colleagues from the MCH training programs. The why and what questions will be addressed primarily this morning and noon through our keynotes and (inaudible) sessions. When we go into the new working groups, we'll ask about what the particular domains of leadership look like.
Later this afternoon and tomorrow, we will focus on measurement frameworks, and outcomes assessments. And just out of curiosity, how many of you were able to access Virginia Reed's paper, which we put up towards the end of the week on our website on outcomes? Oh, a significant number of you. That's terrific. The review of the 1987-88 MCH leadership training conference, the last one which was held, and our first keynote speaker, Dr. Dom DePaola, and our panels of leaders from different health sectors this morning will bring up many aspects of leadership. Keep in mind, as you hear these many concepts of leadership and their personal stories that the goal is to seed your thinking so that when we break into the work groups, we'll have lots of ideas about leadership and its' competencies on our mind. Why leadership? Part of our vision included that MCH leadership has a moral context. Now when you read about ethics and leadership, usually you hear two things. One, that leaders need to behave ethically. And two, leaders encounter ethical dilemmas. But I would suspect that many of you find as we, our speakers shared with us yesterday, that leadership finds you. How many would say leadership finds you, as opposed as you went out looking for it?
Many of you. You're in good company with Martin Luther King, who said that people expect you to give them leadership. Sometimes the events just push you in that direction. Now sometimes you may have a personal mission. And that's what you want to see come about, but that could as easily be a new product or a service as well as some type of MCH training goal. But I would submit that in the health professions in general, and more especially in the MCH context that leadership is not an option, but it's a mandate and it's a requirement. U. S. health professionals have this mandate for many reasons. For one, health professionals training, including our MCH training programs, are publicly funded. The public has a right to accountability on this investment, in the form if significant attention to major issues impacting the public's health. So we must be cognizant of these concerns. Second, the health professions themselves have a social contract.
In addition to public funds, the professions are given the right to self-governance, and the right to practice on the public, literally. Implicit in this aspect of the social contract is our obligation to improve the public's health, not just the health of individual patients we may happen to see. And third, in some sense our knowledge, both because we acquire it, partly through public funding, but because we're the ones with the most expertise in our fields, belongs to the public. No one is in a better position to address these needs and if you don't, who will? No one else knows more about these MCH issues than you collectively. And finally, maternal and child health populations create special obligations to take on issues proactively. The vulnerability and dependency of children, the poverty of young families, the growing diversities and the substantial disparities, the chance to prevent disease all call for a special report. A special response on the part of the Health professions. Moreover, children and young families are our future. And this creates an additional obligation on us. And I am gratified to see there are actually five or six people here who are at a conference three years ago in Washington where we looked at the issues of the moral reasons to allocate resources to children, sponsored by NIDCR and the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. So I feel like we're in the next step of that process.
One reason we have chosen doctors DePaola and Nash to present at this conference is that they speak to this issue. Perhaps they recognize this lack in dentistry, and because of that they articulate this issue passionately, in a way that can benefit all of us. So without further adieu, I would like to turn this podium over to Dr. Huebner and the panel that represents the 1987-88 conference. And we're grateful to have many of you here. Thank you.