Victor Tabbush

Biography

For the past five years Victor Tabbush has been working to transform the health care delivery system for complex, high-need, high-cost older adults and for those living with severe disabilities. His work, which is focused on the integration of the social determinants of health into the medical system, is currently supported by the Commonwealth Fund, the Scan Foundation and the Colorado Health Foundation. He is currently allied with the Hospital Association of Southern California and with the Pacific Business Group on Health to implement innovative care models that incorporate social service organizations in the system of care delivery for Medicare and Medical patients.

Tabbush is the founding director of the UCLA/Johnson & Johnson Management Development Institute (MDI), which builds management and leadership capacity of health systems in sub-Saharan Africa. He is also founding director of the UCLA/Johnson & Johnson Health Care Executive program serving U.S. community clinics and AIDs service organizations, a program he continues to direct.

With prior experience on the faculty of the University of Nairobi and familiarity with the region, Tabbush was well positioned to lead the formation in 2006 of MDI, Anderson's most venerable and established formal partnership with African countries. He says, "MDI's capacity-building effort met a major need: Despite ample antiretrovirals and clinical training, in some regions where HIV/AIDS were most prevalent a serious dearth of management and leadership skills prevented deploying them to their potential. What we're bringing to our partner organizations is the capacity to manage their services more effectively and streamline delivery, allowing more individuals access to more and better care. This makes a significant difference in the quality, quantity and nature of services they are able to provide. That's the theme that connects these projects." To date, 950 participants from 32 African countries have graduated from the program, which celebrated its 10-year anniversary in Kenya.

His current activity in Africa is now focused on an initiative of Jhpiego (an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University) called Safe Surgery 2020, a program designed to provide person-centered surgical care with greater access, safer and improved outcomes for patients in Ethiopia and Tanzania.

Tabbush's history of public service includes chairing the Official Salaries Authority of the City of Los Angeles and serving as a peer reviewer for the World Health Organization. He was a commissioner for the California Worker's Compensation Insurance Commission and for the Los Angeles City Civil Service Commission. He serves on the external advisory Group of the Maternal and Newborn Health Unit of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and at the UCLA School of Medicine Program in World Health. He has been a core faculty member in both the Blue Shield Foundation Clinic Leadership Institute Program and the California Health Care Foundation Leadership Program since the inception of both programs.

At UCLA Anderson, he has served as director of the Office of Executive Education Programs and as senior associate dean and director of the school's Fully Employed MBA and Executive MBA programs. He has won Outstanding Teaching Awards in all three of UCLA's MBA programs - in the full-time MBA program (2000), the Executive MBA program (1998) and the Fully-Employed MBA program (1996).

Education

• Ph.D. Economics, 1973, UCLA