UCI’s Faculty Senate Revives Drive for On-Campus Hospital

UC Irvine’s Faculty Senate unanimously approved a resolution supporting establishment of an on-campus hospital Thursday, reviving a controversial issue that has refused to die despite community opposition and an order by the UC Regents in 1983 to drop the plan.

The vote followed more than an hour of sometimes-contentious discussion most notable for efforts to define--or avoid defining--exactly what the facility would be.

“I don’t like the word ‘hospital,’ ” Dr. Walter Henry, vice chancellor of health sciences and overseer of the deficit-plagued UCI Medical Center, told faculty representatives. “I would rather call it the ‘Center for Health Sciences.’ ”

The faculty vote, prompted by the growing frustration of medical school faculty and students who must commute up to 40 minutes between classrooms and laboratories on the Irvine campus and clinical and research facilities at the medical center in Orange, means “that the issue will stay alive,” Faculty Senate Chairman Howard Lenhoff said.

Chancellor Jack W. Peltason told the Senate that passing the hospital resolution would be “reinforcement of the obvious fact” that classroom, clinical and research programs must be united for ideas and discoveries to be shared. UCI’s College of Medicine faculty already has approved the resolution by a strong margin.

Peltason joked that he often wishes he “could put the keys (to the UCI Medical Center) back on the door of the Orange County supervisors,” who ran the hospital before UCI bought it in 1976. However, he said, construction of an on-campus facility would not mean that UCI would sell or close the medical center, which is expected to lose $13.1 million this year.

“I believe we will always have the responsibility and opportunity for UCIMC . . . ,” Peltason said. “An on-campus hospital will not alter the fact that we have one primary facility in Orange.”

To become a reality, plans for a campus hospital would have to be approved by the UC Board of Regents. Although Peltason suggested Thursday that a portion of the state’s recently discovered $2-billion tax windfall might find its way to UCI, state funding for a campus hospital almost certainly would require action by the Legislature.

Dreams for an on-campus hospital and operation of UCI Medical Center also are inextricably intertwined with reform of the collapsing system of health care for the poor in Orange County. Although the medical center has just 6% of the hospital beds in the county, it carries the overwhelming burden of county indigent care. UCI officials have threatened to cancel the hospital’s Medi-Cal contract and, in an announcement last week, stated that the hospital will turn away women in labor whenever the emergency room and obstetrics ward are full.

Henry, who is charged with reversing the financial losses of the medical center and plotting the future course of the medical school, suggested two options: a single, on-campus clinic with up to 400 beds or a series of research and treatment “clusters,” which would specialize in such fields as cancer treatment and organ transplant. Involvement of private biomedical firms, which have the resources to develop advanced treatment products, would be partners in the clusters, he suggested.

Henry would not say whether such clusters would have in-patient beds, but he did acknowledge one professor’s wry observation: that a transplant center could not operate on an outpatient basis. Any construction, Henry added, would be seven to 10 years away.

One advantage of such a public/private partnership “would be that much of the funds may be able to be raised privately and the clinics could be developed in a modular concept, “ Henry said. “We don’t want to build a hospital in the traditional sense. We want to build a center or series of centers.”

One faculty member, who did not identify himself, challenged Henry’s description of the proposed facility.

“We should call a hospital a hospital,” the professor said. “Anything else is a gimmick.”

While it remains unclear what the faculty vote means in terms of actually building an on-campus hospital, Thursday’s action is likely to renew local opposition. Less than a decade ago, UCI battled People of Irvine for a Community Hospital, a residents’ group backed by the Irvine Co., for the right to build a hospital in the city.

The UC Regents withdrew their support as a result, and construction began on the Irvine Medical Center, a 177-bed hospital now under construction on land provided by the Irvine Co. The center is expected to open in the fall.

Henry argued Thursday that an on-campus facility would not compete with the community hospital, as residents once charged. Unlike community hospitals, the primary mission of a campus hospital would be medical research and education.