Mission & Goals

The mission of the Department of Surgery is threefold:

1. To provide the best possible care to patients who require surgical services in the areas of surgical oncology and general, pediatric, vascular, and transplantation surgery.
2. To provide state of the art educational programs in all areas of clinical surgery and in the biologic basis of surgical illness.
3. To produce new information from its research programs which will contribute to the practical solutions and theoretical structure of future surgical practice.

Because these three goals are equally important and mutually interactive, the members of the department are expected to be supportive of and demonstrate all three.

The Department of Surgery is designed to provide an environment in which all three goals can be pursued simultaneously. The department gains strength in its mission from its collegial relationship with other clinical and basic science departments within the medical school, the health science schools, and the entire university community.

To fulfill our missions, we have set the following goals:

1. To support the efforts of UPMC Health System affiliated hospitals to succeed in the managed care environment by aiding efforts to minimize cost of care and maximize service productivity.
2. To continue to recruit to the department new faculty members whom, in the aggregate, provide balance between administrative know-how, leading-edge practice, superb teaching, and innovative research. To retain faculty members who are at risk of recruitment by competitors.
3. To promote the growth and development of research programs which integrate into surgical practice the advances in cellular and molecular biology and bioengineering.
4. To encourage the development of interdisciplinary clinical, research, and teaching programs between divisions, departments, and schools, and extending to other universities and industries.