Parents Organizing to Protest Planned CHOC-UCI Link

Parents of children who have been treated at Childrens Hospital of Orange County are organizing a protest of the planned reaffiliation between that hospital and the UCI Medical Center, saying they fear that the quality of care will suffer.

Officials from both hospitals hotly dispute that assertion and maintain that the scheduled affiliation on July 1 will merely integrate child-care services between two reputable medical institutions.

Mutual Arrangement

Under the arrangement, UCI will send physicians and medical residents to work at CHOC, while the children’s hospital will regain its access to the university’s medical research. The two hospitals broke a 17-year affiliation two years ago.

“This will in no way jeopardize any of our critical care areas,” said CHOC Medical Director Harriet Opfell.

The protesters, members of CHOC’s various parent support groups, say they are upset with the proposition of using what they term inferior-quality “county doctors” from the university at the privately run children’s institution in Orange.

And, they say, they are worried that specialized doctors now at CHOC will become so dissatisfied with the new arrangement that they will quit and be replaced by the county doctors and the residents in training.

It is common practice for residents, who are overseen by fully licensed physicians during their periods of advanced training, to be used in many hospitals. But the parents worry that the residents will be unsupervised if other doctors quit, a fear that officials at both hospitals say will not materialize.

“I don’t want a resident still in training to take a guess at what is happening with my child,” said Alice Solis, 39, a Santa Ana mother who joined the other parents in a meeting Sunday to draft a protest letter to send out to other parents.

Letters Mailed

The letters, encouraging parents to take their objections to the CHOC board of directors, were mailed Monday and Tuesday to about 800 families who have had children at CHOC, said Sheila Azzara, 35, a Fountain Valley mother in whose home the meeting was held.

One doctor who asked not to be identified said some of the 15 full-time physicians at CHOC are considering quitting if the reaffiliation goes through. Another doctor said the physicians are concerned about their contracts, which expire in July, and a possible loss of autonomy to university doctors. Unlike the earlier affiliation, physicians from the university medical center will join CHOC’s staff of 15 full-time physicians under the new plan.

A third physician, Dr. David Hicks, said resentment also lingers among CHOC’s physicians over what he called the secret process in which the reaffiliation proposal was negotiated between the two institutions.

The hospitals signed a preliminary agreement in December to rejoin by July 1. The agreement is subject to final approval by the UC Board of Regents.

Officials at both CHOC and the UCI Medical Center said that the parents have nothing to worry about and that the arrangement will only serve to enhance patient care. They also said the protest was organized by parents who were contacted for support by a small number of disgruntled CHOC physicians. Representatives of the parents deny outside influences.

“It’s a tempest in a teapot,” Opfell said, adding that the hospital’s medical staff executive committee voted unanimously to support reaffiliation.

Opfell said the reaffiliation will benefit CHOC because it will once again have access to the technological and teaching resources of a major university.

The new plan calls for the addition of 20 physicians from the university medical center to CHOC’s staff. CHOC employs about 200 other doctors on a call basis. The 15 CHOC physicians, in turn, will be asked to join the UCI medical school faculty, university officials said.

Negotiations are currently under way to bring the CHOC doctors on board with the university, said Dr. Edward J. Quilligan, dean of UCI’s College of Medicine.

“We intend to keep all those people,” Quilligan said.

Staff writer Lanie Jones contributed to this story.