18 med students in for surprise

Debra D. Bass

Thursday, March 21, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

Match Day is supposed to be a surprise for medical students, but it may not be a pleasant one for 18 selected for the internal medicine residency program at University Medical Center.

On Match Day, graduating medical students are paired with residency programs nationwide. Matches are determined according to the program students would most like to attend and the program that most wants the students to attend. After months of interviews, students compose a list of their top choices. Schools do the same and a computer does the rest.

When students make up their match lists, they assume the program will remain intact. They certainly don't expect the entire teaching faculty to resign, along with the department chairman, which has been the case with the University of Nevada School of Medicine program at UMC.

Dr. Steve Newmark, who chaired the internal medicine department, stepped down to a faculty position March 1 and has resigned effective April 1. He had a long battle with Dean Robert Daugherty because he believed the school was putting more emphasis on fund raising than improving the quality of education.

Since then, all 11 full-time faculty have said they plan to resign effective July 1.

"Most of us wanted to leave earlier, but we felt an obligation to finish out the year with our current residents," said Dr. Theresa Steckler, the associate program director.

She said working with the school has become "intolerable. It's beyond (Daugherty) being inadequate as a leader. He constantly mettles in the department and is extremely difficult to work with anyway because he yells a lot."

Newmark was the buffer that insulated the faculty from Daugherty, but "since he was fired/quit/forced to resign, it's become very hard to work around here," Steckler said.

Lynne Williams with the medical school information office said the dean is confident the program will not be hampered by rebuilding the department. Daugherty was in back-to-back meetings Wednesday and unavailable for comment.

Dr. Lou Morrow, an internist from Toledo, Ohio, is expected to come aboard April 1 as the acting chairman and the hiring process is in full swing.

Steckler, however, was skeptical of filling 11 full-time faculty positions in less than three months. She said recruitment usually takes a year for one position.

And prospects may be wary of the school considering that a committee of UMC physicians issued a unanimous no-confidence vote March 5 against Daugherty, saying he has not acted in the best interests of the school and students. There's also an attorney general's investigation of the school's billing practices.

Dr. Bob Whipple, who is in the first year of his residency with the program, said the changes are frightening.

"I have two more years of training and now I see us going back in time to when we weren't nearly as good as we are now," Whipple said. "The last thing I want is to move away but everyone in the program is considering leaving. You just can't throw away three years on a bad program. No one wants to be a quack when they are finished."

The school is in the process of notifying the 18 students selected for residencies in the local internal medicine program of the need to rebuild the department. But students with second thoughts may not have a second choice. As of Match Day, all the choice spots are filled, except for a few extraordinary exceptions.