Saturday, March 22, 2008
By Harold Gwin
NEOUCOM sees Youngstown as ‘an incredibly important part’ of its constituency.
YOUNGS-TOWN — Ohio’s chancellor of higher education may be calling for a greater Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine presence in Akron and Cleveland, but NEOUCOM’s president said it won’t come at the expense of current partnerships.
Chancellor Eric Fingerhut made the comments at an Akron Roundtable speech Thursday, and Dr. Lois Margaret Nora said Friday that an expanded presence in one location doesn’t suggest a reduced presence anywhere else.
NEOUCOM, which recently added a College of Pharmacy program, serves a consortium of Youngstown State and Kent State universities and the University of Akron. All three send the medical school up to 35 students each year through a joint BS/MD degree program.
Discussions about expanded links to Akron and Cleveland have been going on for some time, but that doesn’t lessen the importance of the medical school’s current partnerships, Nora said.
Youngstown is “an incredibly important part of our constituency,” Nora said, adding that she is also seeking ways to expand links with the local medical community.
She said she has had recent discussions with members of that community, asking for suggestions on what NEOUCOM might do to solidify the school’s relationship with Youngstown. People are excited about the offer and the local medical community is expected to come back to her with suggestions, Nora said.
Michael Chaney, a spokesman for Fingerhut, said the chancellor didn’t advocate NEOUCOM expansion at the expense of any of the medical school’s partners. Those relationships would remain intact and any expansions would be additions to programming, Chaney said.
He also said that Fingerhut has never advocated moving NEOUCOM from its Rootstown campus, despite reports to the contrary.
In his speech Thursday, Fingerhut said he has accepted the responsibility of implementing recommendations coming out of the Northeast Ohio Collaboration and Innovation Study Committee that completed its work in December.
Among other things, the commission looked at ways NEOUCOM, Youngstown State, Cleveland State, Kent State and the University of Akron can better collaborate to improve educational prospects and development in Northeast Ohio.
Among the recommendations was a suggestion that the governance of NEOUCOM be changed by eliminating the presidents of Youngstown, Kent and Akron from the nine-member board of directors.
Fingerhut said he agrees and proposes to take that a step further by having a totally independent board of nine people appointed directly by the governor to serve the medical school.
Currently, in addition to the presidents, each of the three universities appoints two members to the board.
Fingerhut proposed that the expansion into Akron be through participation in the developing plan to create a center of excellence in orthopedics research.
In Cleveland, he wants to see Cleveland State University become part of the BS/MD program at NEOUCOM’s Rootstown campus (another study committee suggestion) and an expanded NEOUCOM physical presence in the form of additional capacity for training primary care physicians.
“We’re very excited about expanding into Cleveland,” Nora said, but she cautioned there are two prerequisites: First, new, adequate funding would be needed and, second, core partnerships with the universities in Youngstown, Kent and Akron remain intact and not suffer as a result. Some of that additional funding would come from the state, which subsidizes medical education at the rate of $26,061 per full-time student.
The medical school has amazing students coming each year from Youngstown State and that will continue, she predicted.
The addition of Cleveland State to the BS/MD program would result in an increased NEOUCOM presence in Youngstown as more medical students would rotate through local medical facilities each year, including St. Elizabeth and Forum Health, Nora said.
Preliminary plans would have Cleveland State start out with 20 student slots in the program, eventually expanding that to 35 over a period of years, she said. The existing hospital partners would be able to absorb that load, she said.
Part of the study committee report suggested that NEOUCOM take the lead in developing medical research programs in the region and Nora said she looks forward to working with Youngstown hospitals on that prospect.
gwin@vindy.com