THIS ISSUE

IHPME Director's Message

January 2013 was the halfway mark in my first year as IHPME director, and it has been a very exciting six months for me.

Reasons to be proud

As usual, our faculty and students continue to distinguish themselves. Two examples of the Institute's leadership are the award of three new CIHR chairs in Reproductive, Child & Youth Health Services and Policy Research to Drs Astrid Guttman, Joel Ray, and Prakeshkumar Shah, and the appointment of Dr Stephen Hwang as St Michael's Hospital's inaugural Chair in Homelessness, Housing and Health.

We should be proud that IHPME is such a strong, productive and vibrant organization. Clinical, tenured, and adjunct faculty members are regarded as leaders at an international level. Professional and research students describe the Institute as the leading unit of its kind in Canada, point to its high standards, and identify opportunities for improvement to cement this leadership position. The Institute's alumni hold leadership positions across the Canadian health system and are prominent and productive researchers at a number of Canadian universities.

New strategic directions

Many of those successes came about in the context of the Institute's 2009-2012 strategy, which the Institute and its members completed under the leadership of Louise Lemieux-Charles. It is now time to set new strategic directions for IHPME's further development.

To that end, in January we held a very successful retreat, during which about 100 members of the Institute (alumni, faculty, and students) came together to discuss a range of strategic options for our future that had been voiced as part of earlier consultations. The most important changes to these options raised at the retreat were fundamental to how we frame our mission and vision:

• the importance of working to create both ideas and evidence, and
• the importance of improving both health care and health.

During the early part of spring 2013, we will finalize our strategy and begin the process of implementation.

I am, of course, always eager to hear your views on how we can collectively move IHPME forward. Please be sure to get in touch and share your ideas.

Best,

Adalsteinn Brown
Director, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation
University of Toronto