Monday, Aug. 29, 2005 | 9:39 a.m.
Clark County doctors intent on keeping the University of Pittsburgh out of their backyard are now looking at the shortcomings of the University of Nevada School of Medicine and what the university system must do to if it wants to build its own academic medical center in Las Vegas.
The Clark County Medical Society and the Nevada State Medical Association each approved a resolution last week suggesting that administrative control for the School of Medicine, the UNLV School of Dental Medicine, the schools of nursing, public health and other health care related educational programs be ripped from the control of UNR and UNLV and placed under a new president of health sciences who would report directly to the chancellor's office.
A centrally controlled school of public health overseeing all of the state's health education programs would do a better job of using the available resources and would better advance the quality of health care in the state, Dr. Ronald Kline, president of the Clark County Medical Society, said.
The School of Medicine will not be able to advance in Las Vegas as long as its administration and resources flow through UNR, he said.
"We think that the School of Medicine would be a stronger institution if its leadership was removed from UNR and given a person with a more state-wide perspective," Kline, a pediatric oncologist, said.
The proposal's aim is obviously to find a way to build an academic medical center without the help of the University of Pittsburgh, the nationally renowned medical center currently working with the Nevada System of Higher Education to develop a center in downtown Las Vegas, Chancellor Jim Rogers said.
But he and other university officials also said the criticisms raised by the resolution have some merit, and that the medical society is right that there needs to be a more collaborative, coordinated effort between UNLV and UNR to make an academic medical center a reality.
Rogers thinks the resolution stems from past territorial battles between UNLV and UNR over the School of Medicine.
"I think it is a very sound business move on their part to say if you all keep fighting it is going to hurt all of us, and that if we join together the two universities along with the medical society and anybody else in Southern Nevada who is already here, we ourselves could build something directly that could compete with UPMC and we don't need them," Rogers said.
A completely locally owned and operated center is possible and worth continued investigation, Rogers said, but working with Pittburgh gives the state a "faster start."
"They've done this other places, and they can move in and put it together faster. But I'm not sure that given time the people in Nevada couldn't do the same thing."
UNLV President Carol Harter and UNR President John Lilley have also called a truce in recent months and made substantial progress in developing joint plans for the academic medical center, Rogers and the presidents said.
Collaboration is key to the success of the center, Harter and Lilley said, but they didn't think it was logistically possible or necessary to create a whole new administrative structure to foster that collaboration.
"My judgement is that if you strip all the health sciences out and make them a separate institution, you substantially weaken both universities and there is no guarantee that you will improve health care," Lilley said.
Creating a whole other institution would also create additional costs and challenges and likely further postpone the creation of an academic medical center, Harter wrote in an e-mail response.
"It would seem to make sense to pursue a partnership that follows that collaborative philosophy without the cost of additional administrative structure," Harter said.
Because the state's population was primarily in the north when the medical school was founded, all of the infrastructure for the first two years science classes were developed in Reno, Lilley said. The school, however, has always had a state-wide mission, offering clinical rotations in Las Vegas, Reno and in rural areas throughout the state.
The school has been working to increase its residency offerings in Southern Nevada, Lilley said.
But Kline and other local doctors believe that UNR has done enough to expand in Las Vegas, and that the school has hindered its own ability to advance by dividing its clinical and research efforts between two different cities.
"I think that having the research and clinical medicine side by side is important to the development of any academic medical center," said neurosurgeon Benjamin Venger, one of the doctors opposing the proposed partnership with Pittsburgh.
"It's difficult to do so when the research is done in one half of the state and the clinical is so predominately in the other half."
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