A final test for UA med school
Accreditation hangs on team’s visit this week
The University of Arizona’s medical school in downtown Phoenix this week will begin its final exam in a decadelong journey to full, independent accreditation.
University officials are not expecting a breezy test.
The challenge comes in the form of a team of academic medical experts who will visit and critique the school at the Phoenix Biomedical Campus. They arrived Sunday and will stay through Wednesday.
“We would be successful beyond our wildest imaginations if they gave us full accreditation and absolutely no citations,” said Dr. Leigh Neumayer, UA’s interim senior vice president for health sciences. “We do think there will be some areas that they will want to, at a minimum, monitor.”
The Phoenix school opened a decade ago as a branch campus of Tuc-
son’s UA College of Medicine to help address the state’s physician shortage. The UA’s Phoenix school struck out on its own in 2012 when it received separate “preliminary” accreditation, the first of three steps to full accreditation.
But the school’s attempt at mid-tier, “provisional” accreditation stalled in 2015 after the accrediting body, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, warned that changes were needed in four areas before advancing the school. Two of the four findings stemmed from governance issues following Banner Health’s $1.2 billion merger with the UA Health Network and a 30-year affiliation with the medical school. The Phoenix school made changes, and the Liaison Committee advanced the school to provisional accreditation in February 2016.
That’s one reason why university officials don’t anticipate a rubber-stamp review on the way to full accreditation.
A host of ‘interims’
To prepare for the Liaison Committee’s visit, the medical school earlier hosted a mock visit from a four-member team that included a former medicalschool dean, an associate dean and two consultants. The review team lauded the school for its accomplishments, Neumayer said, but the review team also asked why so many Phoenix medicalschool officials had “interim” attached to their titles.
“That’s one that worries me,” said Neumayer, who was named interim senior vice president for health sciences in December after Dr. Joe “Skip” Garcia resigned from the position. The job oversees the UA medical schools in Tucson and Phoenix and three other health-related schools.
The Phoenix school also has an interim dean, Dr. Kenneth Ramos, who was named to the position last year after Dr. Stuart Flynn, the longtime Phoenix dean, and most of his leadership team resigned to take positions at a new medical school in Fort Worth, Texas. The departures prompted the Arizona Medical Association, a 4,000-member physicians organization, to seek an independent investigation by the Arizona Board of Regents.
The regents hired Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie LLP to evaluate concerns, but after spending at least $179,653 on the work, the board determined no action was needed.
The regents have refused to make the report public, citing attorney-client privilege and work-product protections.
A search committee identified four candidates for the dean position, but two candidates have dropped out, Neumayer said.
One candidate decided she was not interested in the position, and a second person chose not to pursue the position after Garcia resigned from the post.
Neumayer declined to identify the two remaining candidates. She said the timing of the new dean’s hiring partly depends on finding time to schedule a meeting with the finalists.
“The two applicants left are highly qualified,” Neumayer said. “It’s a matter of me being able to meet them and what kind of (compensation) package we can put together for them.”
Taking steps to address issues
The Liaison Committee last February also told the medical school there were three areas in which it would continue to monitor progress: the school’s affiliation agreement with Banner Health, the sufficiency of administrative staff and program diversity.
Neumayer and Ramos said some contract language changed in the Banner Health-UA agreement to address the Liaison Committee’s concerns. Those changes included appointing the deans of both the Phoenix and Tuscon medical schools to a joint Banner Health-UA academic-management council.
The UA and Banner Health also made it clear that the medical-school deans in Phoenix and Tucson had full authority over clinical-training appointments for third- and fourth-year students at their respective campuses.
Ramos said the Phoenix school has taken steps to shore up diversity efforts in the recruitment of students, faculty and staff. For example, the medical school has launched a “pathways program” that recruits 19 students from communities such as Latinos and Native Americans that are underrepresented in medicine. The idea is to prepare these students and make them more competitive in the rigorous application process for medical schools.
The Phoenix campus also has tried to beef up administrative staff and faculty recruiting. Last June, the Phoenix school recruited Dr. Michael Fallon, who will be paid $680,000 per year as the first chairman of the school’s Department of Medicine.
The UA pledged a five-year, $40 million package for Fallon to build the department and recruit division chiefs, according to his offer letter.
Ramos noted that the newly opened, 10-story, $136 million Biomedical Sciences Partnership Building will provide space for the medical school to beef up research efforts.
Despite the medical school’s strides, Neumayer said, she would not be surprised if the Liaison Committee issued some type of finding. The most difficult step is achieving preliminary accreditation. All schools that have completed that first step have advanced to full accreditation, though some schools may take longer to get there.
“The point is, just because they find something significant doesn’t mean you are not going to get accredited or re-accredited,” she said. “Clearly, you have to pay attention to the standards and the changes. I view it as a way for us to make sure our medical schools are the best they can be.”