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University of Hawai'i |
(808) 956-8856 Telephone |
For Immediate Release: |
October 22, 1999 |
Contact: Dean O. Smith, 808 956-7486; Cheryl Ernst, 808 956-5941, ernst@hawaii.edu
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| Medicine Dean Edwin Cadman named interim dean of public
health |
The University of Hawai'i Board of Regents today appointed Dr. Edwin C. Cadman interim dean of the UH Manoa School of Public Health. Cadman, who becomes dean of the University's John A. Burns School of Medicine Nov. 1, is charged with incorporating public health instruction into the medical school and seeking accreditation for the public health master's degree program.
The public health school will lose its accreditation in June. In September, a task force appointed to study alternatives reported to regents that an $845,000 investment would be required to meet accreditation standards-money the University does not have after years of budget cuts. Given the situation, task force chair Kenji Sumida, former East-West Center president, reported that the best option is to fold a public health master's degree program into the medical school.
The combined model is not new to Cadman, who comes from Yale University, where the public health school is part of the medical school and reports to the medical school dean. Responding to a question during a get-acquainted meeting with UH medical students a week before the task force made its report, Cadman pledged to seek the financial resources to carry out the University's directives. He emphasized the need for students to have opportunities to study management and public policy along with medicine and stressed the importance of addressing prevention in the education of health professionals. "A medical school should be concerned with issues that affect the public's health, such as disease prevention. We have got to talk about smoking cessation, cancer prevention, heart disease, diet and exercise and early detection of disease," he said.
He reminded listeners that the public doesn't necessarily equate public health as a community need with the administrative structure of a school.
That observation is echoed in comments by state Health Director Bruce Anderson (see attached), noted UH Senior Vice President and UHM Executive Vice Chancellor Dean O. Smith. "We are confident that, with Dr. Cadman's able leadership, the UH public health faculty will develop a strong and viable master's degree curricula and move expeditiously to achieve Council on Education for Public Health accreditation of the program," Smith said.
Cadman is a physician and member of the Yale medical faculty since 1976. He is also senior vice president of medical affairs for Yale-New Haven Hospital and Yale-New Haven Health System and chief of staff at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He previously served as director of the Cancer Research Institute, chief of hematology/oncology and professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. He is an elected fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
