Another High-Level UCLA Medical Administrator Quits

The turnover of top medical administrators at UCLA continued Monday with the announcement that Dr. Raymond G. Schultze, head of the UCLA Medical Center, is stepping down.

Dr. Gerald S. Levey, the new UCLA provost for medical sciences, said the decision was based on a mutual agreement. Others said the decision followed months of friction between Schultze, medical director at UCLA since 1980, and Levey.

Schultze, 61, will serve in his $241,000-a-year job until Aug. 31, then return to the faculty as a professor of medicine. An assistant said he was in meetings all day and unavailable for comment.

UCLA’s Center for the Health Sciences--which includes the medical center, medical and nursing schools, neuropsychiatric institute and patient research programs--has been plagued by budget and accreditation problems, questions about patient protection in research experiments, and embezzlement charges against two former UCLA administrators in a radiological billing services scheme.

But UCLA officials say most of those problems are outside Schultze’s sphere of influence at the medical center and did not figure in the move.

Joseph D. Mandel, UCLA vice chancellor for legal affairs, said the management change stemmed from “a difficulty in meshing styles” between Schultze and Levey, who became provost of medical sciences in September, “and clearly has nothing to do with any of those other problems.”

“It really is more an inability to mesh styles after giving it an eight-month try,” Mandel said.

When Levey was recruited from the post of senior vice president of medical and scientific affairs at Merck & Co., the huge pharmaceutical firm, he was promised full decision-making authority over top personnel, Mandel said.

In an interview, Levey downplayed any personality conflict, saying that Schultze “made the decision to retire from the post; I accepted, and respected his decision.”

Last month Levey confirmed that three top administrators at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and Hospital had resigned.

Denying Monday that a management shake-up was under way, Levey said, “We are building a new paradigm of management, and I think internal shifts within the institution are to be expected.”

Levey said he will initiate a national search for a new medical director. He added that he fully expects the new director to continue to build on some of Schultze’s programs, including efforts to acquire Santa Monica Memorial Hospital, and build a strong primary care network that will fit with the hospital’s ongoing specialty services, such as its highly successful organ transplant programs.

In addition to his faculty duties, Levey said, Schultze will serve as a consultant on health policy and become more active in lobbying efforts in Washington.

UCLA Chancellor Charles Young, in a statement released by his office, said that under Schultze’s leadership, “UCLA Medical Center has consistently been named one of the nation’s finest hospitals,” and praised Schultze’s other roles at the university, including a stint as an administrative vice chancellor.

Though unavailable for comment Monday, Schultze spoke during an earlier interview about some of the problems that he and the medical center faced because of rapid changes in the health care system, particularly with the growth of managed health care plans.

UCLA, as never before, he said, has been forced to negotiate with health maintenance organizations and insurance companies that pressure the university to reduce its charges for heart transplants and other services. At the same time, UCLA must continue to finance strong research and teaching, in part from the medical center’s $400-million budget.

“I would not underestimate the difficulty we are going to have trying to adapt to what is a very rapidly changing health care environment, one in which the basic laws are the laws of economics and not necessarily the kinds of laws that have guided the (medical) professions in the past,” he said. “For institutions like this one, we have had to adapt ourselves to a very different environment.”

Schultze has cut the medical center’s staff from a high of about 4,200 employees five years ago to 3,600 today, with expectations that the number of workers will drop to 3,200 by June, mostly through attrition.

Times education writer Amy Wallace contributed to this story.