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Hospital Merger
forces," says William B. Kerr, executive vice president and chief
operating officer for the new UCSF Stanford Health Care.
Merging the hospitals and clinics into a precedent-setting, $870
million corporation took two years of painstaking and sometimes
acrimonious talks before the Stanford Board of Trustees and the UC Board
of Regents reached an agreement last fall. It seemed a bureaucratic
miracle when the UCSF Stanford Health Care opened its joint doors on
Nov. 1, 1997.
"Can you imagine what we've undertaken?" asks Peter Van Etten,
president and chief executive officer for the center. "By combining
these two facilities, we are ensuring support for a $250 million
research enterprise, one that spawned the biotechnology industry."
The new entity brings together Stanford University Hospital, Lucile
Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, UCSF Medical Center, UCSF/Mount
Zion and the clinical practices of the faculties of both medical
schools. It is the first merger in the nation of private and public
university medical centers. Last year, the two centers admitted a total
of 60,000 inpatients, and treated another 980,000 as outpatients. With a
combined staff of more than 1,748 full-time faculty involved in patient
care, 6,981 community physicians with admitting privileges and 2,608
registered nurses, UCSF Stanford Health Care hopes to maintain the two
institutions' reputations as world-class research and treatment centers
while pushing for new patients in the Bay Area and beyond.
Yet the union is not total. The two medical schools are not part of the
merger. Faculty members, residents and postdoctoral fellows who care for
patients and conduct research at UCSF Stanford Health Care will remain
employees of their separate medical schools, and officials hope that
healthy competition will continue to fuel research and development of
new treatments.
"This unprecedented partnership of private and public university medical
centers offers long-term potential not just for outstanding patient
care, but for joint projects," Stanford University President Gerhard
Casper said when he signed the merger accord. "With closer coordination
and cooperation in teaching, training and research, we can strengthen
even further our ability to move new medical treatments from the
laboratory bench to the bedside."
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