You have to go back in history more than 60 years to arrive at a time when medical schools were not an integral part of Veterans Affairs hospitals nationwide. Like more than 100 other academic medical centers in the U.S., the Medical College of Wisconsin is formally affiliated with the VA, specifically, the Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center in Milwaukee.
If you received your MD degree here in the last six decades, you almost certainly rotated through the VA Medical Center, once called the Wood VA Hospital. Depending on your specialty, if you completed your residency training through the Medical College, you may have trained at the VA.
This relationship was established in 1946 after World War II, when Congress encouraged medical schools to affiliate with VA hospitals to upgrade the quality of medicine provided to the nation's returning war veterans. Through affiliation, VA medical staff members became members of the then Marquette University School of Medicine faculty, and the qualifications required of faculty members were imposed on new members of the VA hospital staff. All VA physicians indeed are Medical College faculty members today.
The Zablocki VA is one of the busiest and most comprehensive centers operated by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It admits 6,400 patients and records more than 533,000 outpatient visits annually. Additionally, College faculty conduct about $15.3 million in research at the VA Medical Center. The VA is also an innovator in electronic medical records and telemedicine.
To keep relationships like ours strong, the Department of Veterans Affairs has appointed a new Blue Ribbon Panel on VA-Medical School Affiliations, which began work this spring. The Panel will evaluate past successes and contributions of the affiliations and examine future challenges and opportunities. Hopefully the effort will produce a vision for making a great situation even better.
Michael J. Dunn, MD '62 Dean and Executive Vice President