UCSF’s plan for new deal with Dignity is scrapped
UCSF has abruptly ended three years of negotiations with Dignity Health, halting plans to share branding and medical services with the Catholic hospital chain while calming critics of Dignity’s religious restrictions on care.
“Given the concerns, we will not continue to pursue the affiliation as it had been envisioned, which would have created a stronger link between UCSF Health and Dignity Health’s four Bay Area hospitals,” UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood and UCSF chief executive Mark Laret wrote in a Memorial Day letter to employees.
More than 1,500 UCSF doctors and hospital staff signed a petition last month opposing UCSF’s effort to expand its two-year collabora
tion with Dignity Health on grounds that the religious hospitals discriminate against women and LGBT patients. The critics, who have urged the UC regents to end the collaboration altogether, have said they were appalled that UC appeared willing to endorse the Catholic hospitals’ refusal, to varying degrees, to perform such medical procedures as abortions, sterilizations and transgender surgery.
Another group of critics, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, last month admonished UCSF, a public university hospital, for a proposed expansion it said would violate the First Amendment’s prohibition against government endorsement of religion.
Laret and other supporters of the expansion have said it would help ease overcrowding at UCSF that is so bad that last year the university turned away more than 850 patients transferred from other hospitals, many of whom needed intensive care.
“Major academic medical centers around the country all are full,” Laret told The Chronicle earlier this month, as he made the case for the affiliation.
UCSF has affiliated with three Dignity Health hospitals since 2017: St. Mary’s and St. Francis in San Francisco, and Sequoia in Redwood City, as a way to increase capacity. And since 2016, it has been negotiating for a larger collaboration with those hospitals and to add a fourth, Dominican in Santa Cruz.
In an opinion piece arguing for the expansion, Dr. David Teitel, a pediatric cardiologist, and Dr. Dana Gossett, an obstetrician-gynecologist, said the partnership with Dignity would mean that women would have access to a new obstetrics unit, critically needed because “UCSF does not have enough beds to meet the growing demand for our care.”
The doctors and other supporters promised that UCSF would not be influenced by religious prohibitions on care, even though it would not be able to perform many services within the Catholic hospitals’ walls.
None of the assurances was persuasive to opponents, including Evan Minton, a transgender man who told the regents this month about being turned away from a scheduled hysterectomy the day before the surgery when Dignity hospital officials learned that he
“Given the concerns, we will not continue to pursue the affiliation.” Letter from UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood and CEO Mark Laret to employees
was transgender.
A recent survey about the proposal sent to UCSF faculty yielded 705 responses: 63% opposed, 27% in support, and 10% neutral.
“I’m really pleased that the administration and the leadership have taken seriously the conflict in values that this presented,” said Lori Freedman, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UCSF who wrote an opposing piece in The Chronicle, noting that Dignity Health “follows religious doctrine prohibiting comprehensive reproductive health care, limiting care for transgender individuals and opposing assisted suicide, which is now legal in California.”
On Tuesday, Freedman said, “I’m looking forward to finding other ways to solve our problems and strategize around optimally meeting patients’ needs.”
Dr. Vanessa Jacoby, the first physician to sign the petition that now has 1,800 names opposing the affiliation, credited the “growing chorus of opposition” for halting the plan.
However, she and Freedman pointed to developments across the country, from President Trump’s new regulations allowing health care providers to withhold care on religious grounds, to the criminalization of abortion in Alabama and other states, as another reason to oppose the proposed affiliation.
They expressed concern that in their letter to employees, Laret and Hawgood said they will continue looking for ways to work with Dignity Health.
“We are committed to finding a viable path forward to help meet patient needs and increase access to crucial health services, including in the areas of adolescent and adult psychiatry, surgical services, primary care and cancer care,” they wrote.