Regents to Vote Today : Acting Chief Backed for UCI Medical Post

University of California regents will be asked today to appoint Leon Schwartz, who as acting director has helped steer the debt-plagued UCI Medical Center out of the red this year, to the teaching hospital’s top post on a permanent basis.

UCI Chancellor Jack W. Peltason said Thursday that he is recommending Schwartz, who has been acting director for 16 months, for the job with the endorsement of the medical school faculty and hospital employees. The university had begun a nationwide search for a hospital director, but Peltason said that he called it off when it became apparent that the best man for the job was already doing it.

“When I asked him to serve as acting director, no one anticipated he would serve as anything but acting,” Peltason said in a telephone interview from Santa Cruz. “As we started searching, people started saying, ‘Why are you looking? We have such a good one here.’ ”

The regents, meeting at UC Santa Cruz, will vote on the Schwartz appointment in a closed session today, UC spokesmen said. At last month’s meeting at UCLA, members of the regents’ hospital governing committee, which oversees UCI Medical Center, had high praise for Peltason and Schwartz during a review of the hospital’s finances.

The center, which is the university’s chief teaching facility for its medical school, is a former county hospital that continues to treat a disproportionately high percentage of poor patients. Unpaid bills and inadequate reimbursement from federal, state and county health-care programs led to a $9.6-million debt for the hospital when its fiscal year ended June 30, 1985. University of California officials last year successfully appealed to the Legislature for a $15-million bail-out for the Irvine center and two other financially beleaguered UC teaching hospitals.

According to a financial report presented to the regents Thursday, the UCI Medical Center’s operating budget was $973,000 in the black at the end of May this year without the subsidy.

Schwartz has credited the dramatic financial turnaround to an influx of privately insured patients, coupled with cost controls.

“He (Schwartz) gets a considerable amount of credit” for the turnaround, Peltason said. “He’s been very successful in that assignment. . . . But we haven’t solved our problems.” The hospital still has past debts and is in the middle of an ambitious renovation program, he said.

Peltason said Schwartz’s appointment would instill “stability” in the hospital’s administration and allow the university to better plan long-term commitments.

Schwartz, 58, left his duties as UCI vice chancellor for administrative and business services in March of 1985 to take over the helm of the 493-bed teaching hospital after the resignation of Director William G. Gonzalez.

Gonzalez’s resignation, which came in the middle of the hospital’s financial crisis, was a “mutual decision by Mr. Gonzalez and Chancellor Peltason,” UCI spokeswoman Kathy Jones said at the time.

Peltason said Schwartz, in addition to assuming the director’s post on a permanent basis, also would resume his vice chancellor duties. The university will begin searching for a “second in command” at the hospital, as well as an associate vice chancellor for business and administration to help Schwartz in his two posts, he said.

“We’ve combined two jobs, but we will recruit major deputies,” Peltason said.

A UCI spokeswoman said Schwartz would receive a salary of $116,000 for the dual duties. His current salary is $87,000, she said.

Schwartz’s appointment “will be very popular with the staff and the faculty,” Peltason said. He is recommending Schwartz after “a widespread consultation on the campus” with representatives from the College of Medicine, the search committee and hospital staff, he said.

Asked why it took so long to name a permanent director, Peltason replied: “I wasn’t in any rush, since Leon was doing such a fine job.” In addition, he said, “We wanted to take our time. We had a crisis, and we went in and we got over the crisis.”

In a telephone interview from Maryland, Schwartz said that although digging the hospital out of debt has been a major accomplishment, new challenges face the medical center.

“I think it’s important that we continue to improve the facility,” he said. An $8-million renovation of the intensive-care unit planned for next year will cause difficulties, as construction forces beds to be moved around, he said. As a cost-cutting move, the medical center closed down one wing--about 100 beds--last year. Schwartz said it will continue to operate with reduced beds until the construction is over.

“In the meantime, it will be difficult while the construction is under way,” he said, “but it’s something we’re gladly doing because we realize the importance of modernizing” the intensive-care unit.

While officials acknowledged a year ago that the medical center suffered a bad image, Schwartz said, the renovations, improved fiscal situation and better relations with county government--which finances care for indigent patients--have hiked staff morale and the public’s perception of the hospital.

The Newport Beach resident is a Maryland native who, before coming to UCI in 1979, was associate director for administration at the National Institutes for Health in Bethesda, Md. Schwartz also held administrative posts at the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Office of Education, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.