2001 Robert H. Ebert Memorial Lecture: Health Care Quality and How to Achieve It

Foreword

The Milbank Memorial Fund and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) established the Robert H. Ebert Lecture on Academic Medicine and the Public Interest as a memorial to an exemplary physician, scientist, dean, and foundation executive. Ebert Lecturers are persons whose careers and character demonstrate broad and effective concern for medicine and the health of the public. They are chosen by a committee appointed jointly by the AAMC and the Fund. The lecture is delivered in odd-numbered years at the spring meeting of the Council of Deans of the AAMC.

Robert Ebert (1914-1996) was an intensely private public man. He linked the laboratory bench and the clinic, care of individual patients with concern for the health of populations, and excellence in research with innovation in the organization and financing of health services. Ebert served his country and his profession as a clinician, investigator, department chairman, dean, foundation executive, and leader of many boards, committees, and commissions. The institutions he enriched during his career include Oxford University, the University of Chicago, Case Western Reserve University, Harvard University, The Population Council, and the Milbank Memorial Fund.

Paying tribute to Ebert in a talk that preceded the first lecture in 1997 and subsequently published by the Fund, Eli Ginzberg concluded his remarks as follows:

Ebert valued peace over contention, consensus over authority. He had an instinctive sense of the way in which institutions become captives of their own history, and he spent considerable time and energy seeking solutions that produced change without upsetting large numbers of persons whose concerns could not, or should not, be ignored. He was a diplomat by instinct, who saw little point in wasting time and energy in conflict if compromise offered a satisfactory alternative.

But this man of peace was also a man of thought, who had a deep appreciation of how things were changing, especially in his area of expertise, and he considered it his duty to figure out what to do about the changes that were underway and how to respond to them constructively. Further, he concluded that it was also his duty to initiate and carry through actions to establish a new, improved match between opportunity and results. Ebert always wanted to improve life, not for those who had power and money, but for the average man and woman who had to work long and hard to make ends meet. He directed most of his life to figuring out how he could use his time and energy to improve the access of this population to medical care services; to do so at a price that society could afford to pay; and, in the process, to train the next generation of physicians, equipping them to minister more efficiently and effectively to the critical health needs of the American people. That was the challenge that Ebert set himself, surely from the time that he became dean of the Harvard Medical School, and that remained his goal for the remaining years of his life. In meeting this challenge, he displayed a dedication that must inspire those who now take up his responsibilities and follow his lead into the new century.

Ebert helped to guide the Milbank Memorial Fund for 30 years: as a member of its Technical Board, a director, and twice as president. Reflecting on his association with the Fund in 1995, he saw a “significant congruence between the evolution of my own thinking and the Fund’s long-standing interest in public health and health policy.”

The Board of Directors of the Fund adopted a resolution honoring Ebert that reads, in part, “We cherish Robert H. Ebert, the private as well as the public man. We affirm the moral and intellectual standards he set for himself, for his friends, and for the Fund. We will miss him.”

Samuel L. Milbank
Chairman

Daniel M. Fox
President