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Dunn offers UB’s perspective on health care recommendations
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
The recommendations of the Berger Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century offer an opportunity to create a health-care delivery system for Western New York that will assure the highest quality of care for patients, as well as the highest quality of training for health-care professionals, UB's senior health-sciences administrator told a New York State Senate public hearing held on Monday at UB.
In testimony delivered at the hearing, held in the Center for Tomorrow, North Campus, David L. Dunn, vice president for health sciences, presented UB's position on the committee's proposals.
A similar hearing was held by the state Assembly at the Central Library in downtown Buffalo. The commission's recommendations will take effect Dec. 31 unless they are rejected by the state Legislature.
The commission's proposals, which include closing St. Joseph Hospital and Millard Fillmore Gates Circle Hospital, merging Erie County Medical Center into Kaleida Health and building a new facility for cardiac and vascular procedures, have come under fire from hospital and union officials across the region.
Dunn, who served as chairman of the Western Region Advisory Committee to the Berger Commission, noted that as a public research university with a significant focus on biomedical research and a major role in the delivery of health care in Western New York, UB is dedicated to ensuring that the region develops "a world-class, cutting-edge health-care system."
The university, through its five health sciences schools and its residency and fellowship training programs, trains on average seven of every 10 health-care practitioners—physicians, dentists, nurses, pharmacists and public health experts—in Western New York, he added.
"To be most effective in preparing the health care professionals of tomorrow, our educational and training programs must be conducted in state-of-the-art facilities operated by organizations with the financial ability to invest in 21st-century programs and equipment," Dunn said.
"Consolidation of facilities will help strengthen and focus UB's programs, which now are spread across facilities, while at the same time assuring that those in training are exposed to the critical mass of patients and a range of cases required to help them develop and hone diagnostic and treatment skills, and conduct clinical trials to find new ways to prevent and cure human disease."
Creating centers of excellence in areas such as transplantation and cardiac care—as opposed to the current system where several hospitals offer the same costly services—will provide physicians and other health-care professionals with optimum training experiences in specialty areas, he said.
Dunn contrasted the situation in Western New York with his experiences in Minnesota, where he served as a faculty member and academic surgeon at the University of Minnesota for nearly 20 years before joining the UB faculty in September 2005.
Minnesota's Department of Surgery, where he served as chair, "was the birthplace of open-heart surgery and became world-renowned for the innovative strategies that were developed at a single academic hospital to treat formerly untreatable heart problems," he said. "Subsequently, the department embarked upon groundbreaking research and clinical care in the field of transplantation."
During his tenure as chair, the department performed more than 200 kidney transplants per year "at a single center" and was able to advance the field through a series of clinical trials and state-of-the-art clinical care, moving into areas such as treating diabetes through pancreas transplantation and working to cure diabetes using cellular transplants, he said.
"Here in Western New York," Dunn noted, "we have numerous heart-treatment programs and two relatively small kidney-transplant programs. We should strive to consolidate these specialized programs and other similar types of programs. We have the opportunity to do what other places across the country have done so well—to create centers of excellence," he said. "The added bonus for Western New York is that doing so will decrease health-care costs and create affordable, accessible, high-quality care at a single center dedicated to such endeavors, while at the same time allowing us to recruit the best and brightest health-care givers and trainees."
UB, he said, strongly encourages the community to consider the recommendations of the Berger Commission "as an opportunity to create a health-care delivery system for the region that will assure the highest quality of care for patients in Western New York, as well the highest quality of training for those who will meet their future health-care needs."