Medical Program Fully Accredited

I would like to provide some additional facts about the UCI College of Medicine’s residency programs that were either omitted or not clarified in your June 13 article (“UCI Medical School Cited by Review Panel”).

We take the national accreditation process very seriously. We have already corrected the majority of areas where we were cited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) and are taking action to resolve the remaining areas of concern.

All UCI College of Medicine residency programs remain fully accredited. In fact, more than 90% of the concerns noted by the ACGME had long been corrected prior to the article--including such issues as ensuring appropriate faculty supervision and providing regular, formal reviews of residents’ performance. Of UCI’s 42 residency programs, only one is currently on probation.

Many of the problems we face in some of our residency programs are the result of reductions in the volume of patients, which affects our ability to provide appropriate levels of training for residents. In specialties that lack adequate patient volume, we have reduced the number of residents, or we share programs with other medical schools. This decline in patient volume underscores the crucial need for UCI Medical Center to affiliate with a larger health-care system if it is to survive in the current managed care environment. By doing so, we will be able to secure long-term access to a broad patient base and thus support the teaching and research missions of UCI College of Medicine.

The accreditation process is an important tool for our continual improvement of our residency programs, and one that we take very seriously.

THOMAS C. CESARIO, M.D.

Dean, UCI College of Medicine