University Times

At a School of Medicine meeting scheduled for Sept. 9, faculty will be asked to vote thumbs-up or -down on the current (and all-but-final) drafts of two key documents related to the new University of Pittsburgh Physicians (UPP) unified practice plan: the UPP bylaws and an employment agreement for new hires.

What difference will it make if medical faculty endorse or condemn the documents, which will largely regulate how they teach, do research and perform their clinical duties? The University Times posed that question to Arthur Levine, who on Nov. 1 will become Pitt's new senior vice chancellor for Health Sciences and medical school dean.

"I cannot speak either for the University or the [UPMC Health System] hospitals as a whole," Levine replied. "I can tell you that, obviously, if a preponderance of the faculty had a strong view I would listen very carefully and try to understand their position and reconcile it with competing positions. But I wouldn't want to pre-judge what action either I or anyone else would take in response to that." Levine said he hoped disaffected faculty would take time to consider "all of the intelligence and effort and imagination" that their colleagues have put into the UPP documents.

"The issues that some faculty members here are wrestling with are not unique to the University of Pittsburgh," he added. "They are national problems and even, to some extent, global problems." Levine said he hopes Pitt medical faculty understand that "if I didn't have confidence in the agreements that have been reached" between Pitt and UPMC to create UPP, "I wouldn't be putting my own career on the line by coming here." Among other questions and criticisms relating to the UPP documents, the following were discussed at an Aug. 19 meeting of medical faculty:

* Apparently under the draft bylaws, UPMC administrators can summarily remove Pitt clinical chairpersons from the UPP board of directors and its executive committee, thereby discouraging those members from dissenting from, or even questioning, UPMC policies.

* The draft employment agreement for new hires doesn't include grievance and appeals processes.

* Physicians hired under the employment agreement who then leave UPP (voluntarily or through involuntary termination) cannot practice medicine for the next two years within Allegheny County or within a 10-mile radius of their principal UPP practice site. Given UPMC Health System's expansion in recent years, this stipulation effectively excludes such physicians from practice in western Pennsylvania, faculty complained.

* New hires are defined as employees of UPP, a subsidiary of UPMC Health System, rather than of the University. Even assuming that the employment agreement does not become a template for similar contracts for all medical faculty, the differing status of new and continuing UPP physicians threatens to fragment the faculty, some professors said.

"Apparently, at least for the moment, tenured faculty will continue to function under University guidelines, new hires under UPMC-HS guidelines and non-tenured faculty in some type of Dantean limbo," professor Sheldon Adler wrote in a letter read at last month's meeting. (Adler is at home recuperating from cardiac surgery — an operation performed at a UPMC hospital, he noted. "I wouldn't put my life on the line with an organization I didn't believe in," Adler said.) The Sept. 9 medical faculty meeting will be held in Scaife Hall lecture room 6 at 4:30 p.m.

–Bruce Steele