“Honors like this are not possible without the incredible dedication and skill of the thousands of team members who serve our patients around the clock,” Wendy Horton, chief executive officer of UVA Health University Medical Center, said. “Their commitment is at the heart of these awards for our medical center and our health system.”
The ranking was one of three handed out by Newsweek that included UVA Health and its affiliates since early October.
Three of UVA Health University Medical Center’s specialties were ranked among the best in the world in the publication’s 2024 list of the world’s best specialized hospitals. Among a field of tens of thousands of hospitals, neurosurgery ranked No. 61, oncology was No. 185 and cardiology was No. 248. All three specialties also earned top marks in Virginia, with neurosurgery and oncology ranking No. 1 in the state.
Earlier this month, UVA Health Surgical Care Riverside was named to Newsweek’s list of “America’s Best Ambulatory Surgery Centers 2024,” based on patient outcomes and recommendations from health care professionals.
The 17,000-square-foot surgery center on U.S. 29 in northern Albemarle County serves patients who typically return home the same day. It features four state-of-the-art operating suites and a procedure room.
Newsweek wasn’t the only organization handing out awards.
Becker’s Hospital Review named UVA Health Orthopedics to its 2023 list of 100 hospitals and health systems with great orthopedic programs.
“These programs are committed to providing exceptional orthopedic care for patients with musculoskeletal conditions or injuries,” the editors of the national health care publication wrote in introducing this year’s list. “The programs on this list treat a high volume of patients each year, offer access to various clinical trials and utilize the most innovative technologies available.”
Becker’s described UVA Health Orthopedics – which saw 200,000 patient visits and performed 10,000 surgeries this past fiscal year, according to the publication – as “a leader in orthopedic clinical care and musculoskeletal research, providing state-of-the-art, comprehensive and cost-effective care to patients with orthopedic disorders.”
UVA Health earned the “Most Wired” award from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, which conducts a national survey of health organizations to assess the integration and impact of technology in health care. On a scale of 1 to 10, UVA Health was rated a 9 in both inpatient and outpatient care – up from an 8 last year.
Technology is used in many ways at UVA Health to provide care and expand access to care. For example, the health system and a coalition of Southwest Virginia groups received a $5.1 million federal grant earlier this year to expand access to care in the region using a variety of innovative telehealth tools. Those tools include interactive home monitoring, virtual urgent care and the expansion of UVA Health’s Isolation Communication Management System, a secure audiovisual system that enables safe care for patients with communicable diseases.
Finally, all four UVA Health medical centers earned “A” Hospital Safety Grades for fall 2023 from The Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit that rates hospitals on how well they provide high-quality patient care.
The four UVA hospitals honored include UVA Health University Medical Center in Charlottesville, UVA Health Culpeper Medical Center, UVA Health Haymarket Medical Center and UVA Health Prince William Medical Center in Manassas.
The hospital safety grades are based on more than 30 national performance measures of patient safety, as well as the systems hospitals have in place to protect patients.
UVA Health Haymarket Medical Center and UVA Health Prince William Medical Center have earned an “A” for 11 consecutive grading periods.
Littlepage and Ciprian Honored With ACC UNITE Award
The Atlantic Coast Conference honored former Director of Intercollegiate Athletics Craig Littlepage and Cavalier volleyball player Milla Ciprian on Oct. 18 as UVA’s recipients of 2023 ACC UNITE Awards.
The award was created to honor individuals who promote and encourage racial equity and social justice through education, partnerships, engagement and advocacy. Those selected have helped create meaningful, lasting change by improving systems, organizational structures, policies, practices and attitudes or have been pioneers and/or helped pave the way for minorities either at the institution or in the community.
Littlepage was named Virginia’s athletics director in 2001, becoming the first African American athletics director in both ACC and school history. Under his leadership, Virginia teams won 13 national championships and 76 ACC titles.
Littlepage was named the Black Coaches Association’s Athletics Administrator of the Year in 2003 and 2006 and made Sports Illustrated’s list of the 101 most influential minorities in sports in 2003 and 2004. He has presented and mentored at the NCAA’s Ethnic Minority Male Institute and the Black Coaches Administrator Association and was named one of Black Enterprise magazine’s “Most Powerful African Americans in Sports.” Additionally, he has led NCAA leadership development programs designed to help aspiring football and basketball head coach and athletics administrator candidates.
Littlepage retired from his position in 2017 after 35 combined years of service at UVA (16 years as athletic director, 11 years in other administrative capacities, and eight years across two stints as an assistant men’s basketball coach) before transitioning to a position in the University president’s office.
Ciprian, a 2022 UVA graduate, was instrumental in the creation of Black Student-Athletes Offering Service and Support, a group that supports and provides community to Black student-athletes at Virginia. As president, she organized events such as game nights, alumni panels and crucial conversations following George Floyd’s death.
As a leader in UVA’s Student-Athlete Advisory Council, she pushed for the addition of a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice subcommittee and later became vice president. In this role, Ciprian coordinated the first Pride Game at UVA, a “Hoo’s Hoo Fair” to highlight student affinity groups within the department, and a Unity Walk to educate peers and staff on the historical and lingering effects of structural racism in Charlottesville.
Ciprian also was a constant volunteer in the community. A winner of the ACC Top XI for Service Award, she volunteered in lower-income neighborhoods in Charlottesville, at the local Boys and Girls Club, and at the Blue Ridge Juvenile Detention Center.
UVA Pathologist Honored With Lifetime Achievement Award
The College of American Pathologists presented Dr. Anne M. Mills, an associate professor of pathology in the School of Medicine, with its Lifetime Achievement Award during a ceremony at CAP23, the college’s annual meeting held last month in Chicago.
In its citation, the group noted Mills has spent the past decade supporting early career pathologists through her work as an educator, career and research mentor, and – for the last four years – as a residency and fellowship program director. She is dedicated to building the specialty by investing in promising individuals from diverse backgrounds who will most benefit from direct mentorship and sponsorship, the citation said.
Mills also has more than 100 research publications to her name to date, including many that have clinical implications to diagnostic pathology of endometrial cancer, heritable cancer syndromes, and human papillomavirus-associated cervical and vulvar neoplasia.
Mills directs the anatomic and clinical pathology residency program and the gynecologic and breast pathology fellowship program.
Ethnomusicologist’s Book Earns Major Prizes in the Field
“Sound Fragments: From Field Recording to African-Electronic Stories,” the groundbreaking 2022 study of the world’s largest archive of field recordings of African music led by Noel Lobley, a UVA assistant professor of music, won two prizes at the recent Society for Ethnomusicology meeting.
“Sound Fragments” won the Bruno Nettl Prize, “to recognize an outstanding publication contributing to or dealing with the history of the field of ethnomusicology, broadly defined, or with the general character, problems, and methods of ethnomusicology.” It shared the Ruth Stone Prize, “to recognize the most distinguished English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology, published as the author’s first monograph.”
The book had already won the International Association for the Study of Popular Music’s 2023 Book Prize.
(Watch a one-minute primer on “Sound Fragments” on YouTube.)
Lobley, an ethnomusicologist, sound curator and artist, works with music, anthropology, sound art and composition to develop a series of experiential sound events and international curatorial collaborations. Through extensive fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa, much of his creative practice takes ethnographic sound and music recordings out of archives for repurposing among communities.
He has collaborated with musicians, sound artists, DJs, choreographers and composers in South Africa, the U.K. and throughout Europe and the U.S. to develop creative and ethical ways for recordings to be experienced in galleries, festivals, museums, schools, rainforests and township street corners.
“Sound Fragments” is an ethnographic study of sound archives and the processes of creative decolonization that form alternative modes of archiving and curating in the 21st century. It explores the histories and afterlives of sound collections and practices at the International Library of African Music at Rhodes University in South Africa. The book follows what happens when a colonial sound archive is repurposed and reimagined by local artists in post-apartheid South Africa.
Law Professor To Study Environmental, AI Challenges in Paris
School of Law professor Michael Livermore is in Paris this school year through a fellowship dedicated to addressing looming global challenges.
Livermore, who teaches courses on environmental law, regulation, and law and technology, is studying legal, ethical and political responses to human interactions with the environment, and with artificial intelligence, as the “Major Changes” Chair, hosted by Sorbonne University and the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.
