Partnership with Touro University considered for UMC

By Kyle B. Hansen

Wednesday, June 8, 2011 | 2:35 a.m.

Clark County commissioners may have found a new medical school to work with after they spent the past few months bashing the University of Nevada School of Medicine for what they say is a lack of interest in improving University Medical Center.

Officials from Touro University, which operates a private medical school in Henderson, would like to partner with the county and send its students to UMC to do their residencies and other training.

Currently, only students from the state medical school, which is part of UNR, not UNLV, work at UMC.

Commissioners, who act as the public hospital’s trustees, have been publicly feuding with UNR over the medical school and UNR’s refusal to require the new dean to live in Las Vegas instead of Reno.

In past meetings, commissioners have said they will look for another school to work with if UNR will not cooperate.

Touro officials took a more gentle approach Tuesday, saying they have a vision of a future heath services center that would likely include more than one medical school and more than one hospital.

Touro already is working with Valley Hospital, which is next door to UMC, but it wants to expand its programs and says UMC has plenty of capacity to use students from both schools.

“It has to be collaborative from the very beginning,” said Dr. Mitchell Forman, the dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Touro and president of the Clark County Medical Society.

Forman said he has seen similar setups in other places, and they improve the quality of the institutions involved and health care for the community.

“Other communities have done it. Why can’t we?” he said.

Touro first came to the Las Vegas area in 2004 and is the largest medical school in the state with about 500 students at any given time in different programs, said Dr. Michael Harter, the senior provost and CEO of the university.

Many graduates, however, are leaving for other areas because there are not enough positions for residency work here, Forman said. If the students finish their training in the valley, they will likely stay here for their entire careers, he said.

The commissioners seemed to like the idea of working with Touro and directed their staff and UMC officials to begin working on a plan and return to the next hospital trustees meeting to discuss it.

The board has been talking about how to improve UMC, which has perpetually lost money for the county.

“It seems like the door is really open,” said Commissioner Susan Brager. “We’ve talked and talked and talked this thing to death. We need to take some action.”

Commissioner Steve Sisolak, a former higher education regnant, said Touro is more likely to get things done. “It seems like there’s a lot more flexibility and expediency when it comes to dealing with Touro,” he said.

The commissioners also said they would send a letter to the board of regents for their meeting next week to emphasize their concerns and the need to move forward with the medical school.

The commissioners are scheduled to have a hospital board meeting in July to discuss the medical school plans further.