Drew University focuses on its mission

It’s a small campus along a side street where Willowbrook meets Watts in South Los Angeles. You’d hardly know from looking that so many dreams have been at work here for such a long time. Even those who care most about the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science have been heard to joke among themselves that it is just two buildings and a trailer park.

But Drew was in quest of better. Wind the clock back four months, and there was a feeling at the inner-city university that better times had arrived. The school had a new president, the promise of political support, plans for a big expansion and fresh accreditation for its residency doctors.

Plus, that one all-important thing that Drew often lacked -- respect -- seemed at least plausible.

Then the roof collapsed. In a span of a little more than a month, the university was swept into the fight over its place as a healthcare provider for the poor in some of the poorest Los Angeles neighborhoods.

Its next steps are by no means certain, and its future is clouded as never before.

“If you ask me, ‘Are we going to survive?’ I haven’t any doubt,” said Susan Kelly, who marked her six-month anniversary as Drew’s president last week. “But what it’s going to look like, what pitfalls lay ahead, I can’t tell you.”

Many links to hospital

For more than a generation, the independent university has been linked in name, in fact and in controversy with the county-administered public hospital across the street, the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. The university’s medical school has provided resident doctors for the hospital, and the hospital in turn served as a training ground for Drew’s students.

Together, the two institutions were an important part of Los Angeles County’s answer to the Watts riots of 1965.

Indeed, Drew University came into being with a mission to train minority doctors who would serve poor, inner-city residents. It began instructing newly graduated doctors in medical specialties, with up to 300 residents at a time on the wards, and in the operating rooms and emergency room at King/Drew.

Then, Drew University established a college to grant basic medical degrees in partnership with UCLA, with students spending their first two years at UCLA and the final two at Drew. The goal was not only to provide healthcare for the poor but also to expand opportunities for young African Americans -- and later other minorities -- to study medicine.

By 2005, according to the independent California Wellness Foundation, more than one-third of minority doctors in Los Angeles County received training at the university.

Apart from physician training, Drew also established a separate 300-student College of Science and Health to train medical technicians, counselors and physician assistants. The university undertook research projects aimed at the specific healthcare problems of uninsured, mostly minority communities.

Periodic crises

But it hasn’t been a smooth journey. Just as Drew University shared its beginnings with King/Drew, just as the two teamed up to provide healthcare and medical training, the institutions wound up with something else in common: troubles.

Over the years, the quality of care, the oversight of schooling, the efficacy of administration all came under intermittent and withering criticism.

Going back at least to the 1980s, Drew University has had periodic credentialing crises for various residency programs. More recently, three were shut down: radiology, surgery and neonatology. At one point, millions spent training Drew’s residents could not be accounted for, by either the university or the hospital. Auditors found that costs for Drew’s faculty and academic support were 57% higher than at a comparable hospital, Harbor UCLA Medical Center near Torrance.

David Satcher, former surgeon general of the United States, concluded in a 2003 report that Drew University and the county hospital lacked a “working partnership.” He called for a new “culture of accountability.”

In response, Drew University revamped its board and ultimately brought in Kelly. She embarked on a campaign to expand the university on several fronts and to draw public attention to accomplishments that had gone unsung. Drew received a favorable review and full accreditation of its residency program. The university’s endowment grew.

It was too late.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ decision to pull $200 million in federal funding from the medical center hit the university hard and dead center. The county responded with a plan to downsize the King/Drew medical center, and Drew University quickly found itself without an affiliated teaching hospital.

Soon, the accreditation of its residency program was jeopardized. So was money to pay salaries for 251 current residents. Last Wednesday, Drew’s administrators announced that they would withdraw from residency instruction beginning in July, the start of the 2007 academic year.

But even this did not end Drew’s struggles.

County support

In interviews, Kelly and Drew’s board chairman, Bart H. Williams, set forth their inventory of challenges facing the university:

* First, they said, the county must be persuaded to continue to pay salaries for Drew’s residents through the school term that ends in mid-2007.

Last week, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky would not comment on the county’s financial obligations to support the residents but said county counsel is looking closely at the issue. “It doesn’t make the county happy to see this upheaval at Drew University,” he said. “That’s not our objective.”

Dr. Gina Jefferson, one of the residents’ representatives on the university’s governing committee, said the county is “essentially not taking us seriously. The short-term plan obviously hinges on county support.”

In addition, other hospitals in the area must agree to accept these residents for their continued training in the short term.

“We will then join the 50% of America’s medical schools who have no teaching hospital,” said Kelly.

* Drew must help its uprooted residents find institutions where they can finish their 3-year to 5-year specialized studies.

* Beyond that, Drew’s faculty structure will have to be reinvented. Kelly said the number of full-time staff doctors will inevitably shrink. They will have to be replaced, she said, by hiring practicing physicians who are willing to teach part-time.

* In addition, Drew’s research programs, which have made the university among the fastest-growing research institutions in the country, must be maintained even though patients will probably be scattered among other area hospitals.

Satcher has said Drew’s research work is essential to understanding the health needs of the uninsured. In an interview, he noted the recent U.S. sweep of Nobel prizes in medicine and research.

“But getting the benefit of this research to those who need it is something else,” he said.

“And that’s where we are weak. It takes a long time, and for poor communities it takes even longer. In this, Drew plays a critical role.”

In simplified terms, such research might measure how a blood pressure drug affects black patients differently than whites. Or how healthcare providers must compensate for the fact that breast cancer is frequently detected early among women with insurance but not among minority women who have no insurance.

‘All about Drew’

Kelly is also pushing ahead with expansion plans for Drew, ideas that seem increasingly audacious given the intensifying swirl of bad news.

For just that reason, Kelly insisted, “we need this more than ever.”

First, Kelly and Drew’s political patron, Assemblyman Mervyn M. Dymally (D-Compton), have announced they will present a plan to the University of California Board of Regents on Nov. 15 to expand Drew’s undergraduate medical school from the two-year partnership with UCLA to a full-fledged four-year institution, while at the same time maintaining a relationship with UCLA.

Dymally carried the original legislation to create Drew and has supported the university during his long political career. For a time, he taught health policy on campus. In December, he will assume the chair of the Assembly Health Committee, and he has vowed that Drew will be his top priority.

“My next two years as chairman are all about Drew,” Dymally said in an interview. “I’m concentrating on Drew. Call me about Drew and I’ll be there.”

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger lent support in a letter to the regents on behalf of four-year status for the school. “I encourage you to carefully consider their presentation and request,” the governor wrote.

Kelly said Drew would make good on plans to break ground at the end of the year on a $33-million building for an accelerated school of nursing. Groundbreaking is expected soon for a building to replace temporary clinics and provide a permanent space for research.

Kelly said Drew would begin to rebuild its residency programs in 2008, one specialty at a time.

In short, Drew University has charted a course to overcome its past, manage its tumultuous present and argue the case for its future while remaining faithful to its founding goal of providing doctors for the poor.

“They are going to take time to strengthen the institution. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” said Sylvia Drew Ivie, a health consultant on behalf of the underserved and daughter of the physician for whom the university is named. “A crisis can be made into an opportunity.”

That sentiment was shared by Dr. Robert Ross, president of the California Endowment, a private foundation devoted to healthcare solutions for the poor: “The recent events may actually set the stage for a completely reinvigorated institution. It’s just painful at the moment.”

‘Severely damaged’

Doubters may wonder if Drew isn’t overreaching.

That point of view, the university’s backers argue, overlooks the agonies that gave rise to the university in the first place: five days of riots, 34 dead, 1,000 injured, millions in property damage.

“Drew is severely damaged.... But it’s not like we’re starting over from scratch,” said Bart Williams, chairman of the Drew Board of Trustees. “We’re going to have to go back a few steps, but people died to create what we have now.”

john.balzar@latimes.com

Times staff writers Rong-Gong Lin II and Susannah Rosenblatt contributed to this article.