Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

County officials say UMC is ‘stepchild’ to UNR medical school

UMC

University Medical Center is Clark County’s only publicly funded hospital.

Click to enlarge photo

Steve Sisolak

Click to enlarge photo

Chris Giunchigliani

Medical residents presented a unified feel-good message to Clark County commissioners, talking about the good they do for Southern Nevada while working at University Medical Center.

But county commissioners were unmoved by the physicians, who arrived en masse to the meeting wearing white lab coats. Commissioners said they are tired of empty promises and expressed frustration that while Clark County pours up to $80 million a year into UMC, the medical school at UNR, which is in partnership with UMC, and the university system’s Board of Regents all but ignore UMC’s needs.

Commissioner Steve Sisolak, who sat for 10 years on the Board of Regents, said over that time “not one time did (UNR or the Board of Regents) spend 50 cents in Southern Nevada.”

“I’m talking about (out of) hundreds of millions of dollars that was allocated to UNR,” he said.

That said, he added, UMC and Clark County have "an obligation" to seek out relationships and potential partnerships with other medical schools. He encouraged University Medical Center chief Kathy Silver to seek out those schools, which he said might show more commitment to the hospital than the medical school in Reno.

“We are no longer going to be treated by the medical school or the regents as the stepchild,” said Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani.

For many months, commissioners have complained about the fact that the connection between University Medical Center and the medical school has been weak, at best. Then UNR announced the hiring of a dean who will spend most of his time in Reno, despite the fact that commissioners had already said they wanted a dean to live in Southern Nevada. When it was announced that the vice dean would live in Las Vegas, Sisolak called it “insulting.”

But Sisolak stressed his complaint was “never about the dean living here … this is about commitment. And you simply cannot understand Southern Nevada by being here for 24 hours a week, then heading back up to Reno. It just doesn’t work.”

He was supported by former university system Chancellor Jim Rogers, who said that during his five years as chancellor, and for the 35 years before, “that medical school has not made any effort to increase what it’s done in Southern Nevada. And I don’t think you can take their word that with the new dean (that record will improve).”

Though complaints have arisen in the last few years about the so-called lack of commitment, Rogers added, “why the hell haven’t they (the medical school) had a plan for the last two, three, four years to solve their needs? They solve their needs in Northern Nevada, but they don’t solve the needs of Southern Nevada.”

He concluded by saying that if commissioners continue on with their current relationship and how it works with the medical school, “they will back off again, because they don’t understand what the needs of Southern Nevada are.”

Discussion of the medical school/UMC relationship will continue at the next commission meeting in two weeks, when university Chancellor Dan Klaich is expected to speak.

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