Strengthen UCI Medical School
The UC Irvine medical school has been buffeted by a series of scandals in the last four years. Now an outside panel has pointed the way to avoid more problems. The suggestions are full of common sense.
As previous examinations of the school have noted, the faculty is first-rate and the research cutting edge. That’s all the more remarkable considering that the school was only established three decades ago. It’s not a longtime establishment pillar acting as a magnet for top-flight researchers.
But as also noted before, administrative tasks did not keep pace with research advances. That’s an area that needs far more attention than it has received. To their credit, the university’s chancellor, Ralph Cicerone, and the medical school dean, Dr. Thomas Cesario, have agreed to create a new position for a senior associate dean to oversee administrative staffing. Having one person pulling all the strands together should improve oversight and accountability.
The six panel members brought in by Cicerone last fall to examine the school emphasized basic steps. The dean and the heads of departments have to know their responsibilities. Physicians who are promoted to administration need training in how to fulfill their new duties. Standards need to be spelled out clearly.
The faculty at medical schools look upon themselves as doctors, teachers, researchers, not administrators. They heal the sick and find new cures; they don’t push papers.
But taking an administrative position means seeing to it that the documentation is in order, that the procedures that supposedly were performed really were done and that the charts demonstrating that are filled in.
Several years ago, it was disclosed that doctors at the College of Medicine’s acclaimed fertility clinic stole the eggs and embryos of scores of women and implanted them in other patients. The clinic was shut down. Later investigations showed that cancer researchers improperly charged patients for experimental treatments and a professor used patient’s blood samples for research without permission.
Last summer, the director of the Willed Body Program was fired after allegations that families were charged to retrieve the remains of their loved ones and a cadaver was used for an unauthorized anatomy class offered by an outsider in the basement of the medical school.
The outside experts, who included a former dean of the Stanford medical school, also recommended putting the medical school, in Irvine, and the university’s hospital, in Orange, on the same campus. That bears investigating, but is unlikely to happen any time soon.
The job of the school’s dean, faculty and administrators now is to implement the suggestions of the outside panel. To retain good personnel and attract staff, to continue its climb toward the first rank in the nation’s medical schools, the school has to carry out the reforms.
