Health affairs VP joins U Arizona
Joe G.N. “Skip” Garcia, vice president for health affairs. Photo: Roberta Dupuis-Devlin/UIC Photo Services (click on image for larger file size)
Joe G.N. “Skip” Garcia, vice president for health affairs, was named senior vice president for health sciences at the University of Arizona effective Sept. 1.
Garcia joined UIC in 2010 as vice chancellor for research. He was appointed vice president for health affairs in 2011, a position created through administrative restructuring by then-UI President Michael Hogan.
Garcia led a rebranding of the hospital, clinics and health sciences colleges to become the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System.
“Together we re-purposed the mission statement of the clinical enterprise to place front and center an emphasis on community service and to those most in need by highlighting a pledge to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities,” he said in an email announcing his resignation.
“We’ve made a commitment to becoming a destination of choice for patients by emphasizing a customer-first approach to care delivery, patient safety and quality outcomes. We’re promoting UI Health as a system that cares about the community and the medically underserved.”
An interim vice president will be named soon, said U of I President Bob Easter, adding, “decisions about the position and organization will be made deliberatively and collaboratively at the appropriate time.”
Before coming to UIC, Garcia was professor and chair of medicine at the University of Chicago.
He was chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins University, where he also held an endowed chair in medicine and faculty appointments in environmental health sciences and biomedical engineering.
He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.
Easter said the university’s health care enterprise will be the focus of a U of I Board of Trustees retreat July 24 in Chicago.
“I am convinced that the University of Illinois is in a strong position among universities in this country to be an innovator in new health delivery models and practices,” Easter said.
“The promising future of our health care enterprise and health sciences depends upon having a strong faculty and staff, and the retention of our current faculty and staff is a high priority for my administration. We are training tomorrow’s health care workforce, and we need their talents to be successful and effective in our mission.”
