Medical School

As part of a $100 million project to build a medical school, Camden City Council last night authorized the acquisition of a downtown block that includes a methadone clinic. Council also tabled the $1 billion Lanning Square redevelopment plan, of which the medical school is part. Chief operating officer Melvin R. "Randy" Primas Jr. said that meetings with residents had to be held, and that officials had determined the plan was not be needed to acquire the property for the medical school.

Congratulations to Cooper University Hospital and Rowan University. They're holding a celebration today in Camden to mark their partnership to create a medical school. Gov. Brendan Byrne promised South Jersey a four-year medical school 30 years ago. But it took that long to get the right mixture of fate, politics, and economics needed to finally make it happen. There was that fateful day in April 2007 when Gov. Corzine was critically injured in a car wreck on the Garden State Parkway.

The number of people applying to medical schools here and around the country is down significantly, ending a boom that began in 1988. Maybe being a doctor is losing its cachet in the age of managed care. Maybe the newly robust economy is making other jobs look better. No one knows for sure. Nationally, applications began falling with the class that entered medical school last fall, and the trend is continuing, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)

By Ravi Goel The state legislature is fast-tracking a bill to allow optometrists to perform surgery and prescribe narcotics, all without benefit of a medical school education. The head of the state optometric association recently argued to the legislature that optometrists, although they have never performed microsurgery, should be allowed to perform laser surgery after taking a one- or two-day seminar. Laser surgery is surgery. Surgery should be performed by surgeons.

The sharp decline in the number of young men and women electing to study medicine has been explained by some as a reaction to market forces. Medical schools, the reasoning goes, are educating more physicians than the nation needs to care for its citizenry, now and into the future. And the applicant pool, which has dropped from 2.8 applicants per seat to fewer than 2 per seat in a little more than a decade, simply has responded to market demand. But more than market forces are at work.

The dean of the MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine yesterday announced that she had resigned and would step down as soon as a replacement is selected. Barbara F. Atkinson has been dean of the medical school since March 1996, a tenure that included the months of financial turmoil caused by the collapse of the Allegheny health system. "My goal over the last few months was to get the school restructured, reorganized, and ready to move out of bankruptcy. I feel that we accomplished that," Atkinson said yesterday.

The University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday received a record gift of $225 million for its School of Medicine from Philadelphia philanthropist Raymond G. Perelman and his wife Ruth. Perelman signed the papers finalizing the gift on Tuesday at the home of University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann, he said later Tuesday. The gift benefiting the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, as it will now be known, had been in the works for about a year, Perelman said.

When Gov. Corzine signed a bill this month to provide $270 million for stem-cell research in New Jersey, he talked about funding a science that could one day change the medical landscape. On the landscape of Camden, that money could have a much more immediate impact. Included in the bill is $50 million for a new stem-cell research center in the struggling city. The center, to be operated by a consortium of the state's medical and research heavyweights, has been proposed for a stretch of Broadway near Cooper University Hospital.

The South Jersey Port Corp. board unanimously approved a lease yesterday that will move a drug-treatment facility from downtown Camden, where it is in the way of plans for a new medical school, to the city's Delaware River waterfront. The measure, approved without comment from the governor's appointees on the board, was roundly condemned by activists from the Waterfront South community, who said powerful political forces had forsaken one neighborhood to favor another. "It is a hell of a day when the revival of one community depends on the death of another," said Patrick Mulligan, assistant director of Heart of Camden, a nonprofit in Waterfront South, where the clinic will be moved.

Don't expect the Allegheny name to disappear this week. Tenet Healthcare Corp., which had been expected to close its purchase of eight Allegheny hospitals tomorrow, was granted a delay yesterday after citing its failure to find an academic institution to manage the health system's university. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge M. Bruce McCullough agreed to postpone a hearing on the future of Allegheny University of the Health Sciences until Nov. 5. McCullough quickly granted the delay requested by Tenet and Allegheny, saying, "I can't force anybody to do anything.