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Expansion of AHC offers opportunities
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
What a difference two years can make. Just ask David L. Dunn, UB's vice president for health sciences, who spoke to the full Faculty Senate on Tuesday about plans for the UB Academic Health Center (AHC).
Dunn recalled his first visit to the senate in November 2005, just three months after he left the University of Minnesota to take the new job at UB because, as he said at the time, he saw "enormous opportunity here."
Dunn said he sees even more opportunity here today as UB moves ahead with plans to expand its Academic Health Center, a consortium of the five health sciences schools: dental medicine, medicine and biomedical sciences, nursing, pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences, and public health and health professions.
The recommendations of the "Berger Commission"—the state Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century—have the potential to help UB "vault forward in the rankings, recruit new faculty and possibly have something that looks like a tertiary health-care facility.
"It won't be a SUNY-owned university hospital because of the extent of funding," added Dunn, who serves as secretary-treasurer of the commission's regional advisory committee.
"Increasingly, we're recognizing that UB is an economic driver for Western New York. People ask me why I would even consider looking at a position here. The answer is with my background, what better place to be in New York than at UB in the middle of Western New York dealing with all the health science growth issues?"
UB's three campuses "present opportunities, but also challenges," Dunn acknowledged.
"We don't have what we might want to have within the next several years, including having light rail transportation at the North Campus, South Campus, all the way down to the BNMC (Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus)," he said.
The planned growth through UB 2020 and the campus master-planning process, he added, means the UB Academic Health Center could add 400 new students, 250 new faculty positions, four to five remodeled buildings and three or four new buildings on the South and downtown campuses.
"But it's not about buildings; it's about faculty and it's about students. We're a very large engine for public health-sciences education and turning out the next generation of practitioners in these areas," Dunn said, adding that schools in UB's AHC graduate about 1,200 professionals annually.
"That's something that Kaleida, ECMC, the Catholic Health System—they all need us," Dunn said. "They need the physicians, the nurses, the pharmacists, the dentists and so on. This has really got people's attention, mainly because there are studies nationwide that show there are shortages in these areas. UB is a very large portion of the solution to the fact that we're losing health-care practitioners in Western New York. We have the ability to repopulate those ranks."
Gayle Brazeau, associate dean for academic affairs in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, asked again about the subject she asked Dunn about in 2005: giving nurses, pharmacists and other health-care professionals the ability to form practice plans.
Dunn, who expressed dismay two years ago that state law excludes this, told Brazeau on Tuesday that "SUNY has now been asked to draft legislation in this area," the first step toward changing the law on this issue, which dates back to the 1950s.
In other business, Marsha S. Henderson, vice president for external affairs, reported on the progress of UB's 2007 Campaign for the Community, which has reached the halfway mark in its pledges.
Addressing the relationships between SEFA, the United Way and Planned Parenthood, Henderson noted that the regional SEFA campaign in Western New York "contracts with United Way to be the administrator of the campaign, in order to help with the collection and administration and dissemination of information. But the two campaigns—the United Way's and our SEFA campaign—are two separate organizations and entities."
As in the past, Planned Parenthood remains "an option" that SEFA donors may designate as their organization of choice, Henderson said, adding that Planned Parenthood "is very supportive of the SEFA process and donor designation through that process."
United Way only benefits from SEFA in terms of the administrative fees it receives, she added. "It's a very modest 8 percent of all funds contributed that are paid for that administrative cost," she said.
When asked if United Way holds SEFA funds in interest-bearing accounts and how often it distributes those funds, Henderson said UB SEFA donations "go into a separate account managed by SEFA regionally and are distributed through that account to the organizations designated," but added she will check into how often the funds are distributed.