If approved, the restraining order would prohibit the two-day strike planned by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 3299. According to a statement released by the UC Office of the President on Friday, strikes that pose an imminent threat to public health and safety are illegal under state law, and the university believes the strike would improperly withhold health care from the public.

Dianne Klein, a UC spokesperson, said that if the union cared about patient safety, it would not endanger patients by striking.

“This (strike) is one of their tactics to get what they want, which is a special deal for their workers,” Klein said. “That is not only unfair but fiscally irresponsible.”

The strike comes amid ongoing contract negotiations that began in June 2012. The university proposed a pension reform that would increase contributions toward pension benefits from both the university and employees, but AFSCME 3299 rejected these reforms, arguing that the university is prioritizing pensions over patient care.

According to Todd Stenhouse, spokesperson for AFSCME 3299, the university is prioritizing executive pension benefits instead of adequate patient care and staffing.
“We are seeing the university cut corners in ways that are so dangerous for patients,” said Kathryn Lybarger, president of AFSCME 3299.

AFSCME 3299 has established a Patient Protection Task Force to care for patients during the strike, but that it is something in which the university refuses to participate, according to Stenhouse.

During pension reform negotiations, AFSCME 3299 asked for caps on executive pension benefits, which the university would not discuss, according to Lybarger.

“Right now, these executives are going to retire on upwards of $300,000,” Lybarger said. “That’s a lot of money to live on for doing nothing.”

The university filed a similar restraining order in July 2008 in response to a planned AFSCME 3299 strike. The court approved the restraining order, but the union went ahead with the strike.

“If the court says you are prohibited from striking and they go ahead and do it anyway, they are breaking the law,” Klein said. “We hope there is not a strike. We are prepared for one.”

University Professional and Technical Employees, another UC medical workers union, also held a demonstration Wednesday at the five UC medical centers.

AFSCME 3299 also held a sit-down protest at Wednesday’s UC Board of Regents meeting in Sacramento, resulting in the arrest of 13 demonstrators.

“We are in this fight to win real patient protection,” Lybarger said. “It’s not an option to emerge from this fight without having won real gains for our patients.”

Contact Tara Hurley at thurley@dailycal.org.

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The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 3299, a union that represents UC workers, joined with University Professional and Technical Employees 9119, a union that represents UC technical workers, to protest recent layoffs at the UCSF Medical Center and the standoff in labor negotiations with the UC Office of the President.

“There’s a fundamental message that this rally is all about today,” said AFSCME 3299 spokesperson Todd Stenhouse. “That’s ‘put patients first.’ We need to send a message to the people of San Francisco that come into this hospital that the administration is not putting their priorities first.”

UCSF Medical Center recently cut 300 positions through layoffs, transfers and elimination of unfilled positions, which comes in the wake of a recent whistleblower report published by AFSCME in March detailing inadequate patient care at UC medical centers due to understaffing.

“Medical centers are going to continue to deteriorate,” said Wendi Felson, a retired UCSF employee and systemwide health care coordinator for UPTE. “All five UC medical centers have been cited for patient care violations.”

Since last November, the UC system and AFSCME have also been at an impasse over creating a new contract for UC workers focusing on pension reform.

Among the protesters were recently laid-off UC workers, including Miguel Herrera, a full-time custodian who was fired three weeks ago, and Connie Salguero, a former patient-care assistant who was fired this week.

“This was my only job here,” Salguero said. “Where will I get my food?”

According to UC spokesperson Dianne Klein, the protest is a tactic used by the union in labor negotiations, and AFSCME refused the contract without offering counter-suggestions.

“Bargaining in the media is not something we support,” Klein said about the protest. “We believe bargaining should take place at the bargaining table.”

State Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, and San Francisco Supervisors John Avalos and Eric Mar also appeared at the protest to support the workers.

“They’re understaffed in terms of things not being properly sanitized, and those are things that put patients at risk,” said Yee’s press secretary, Dan Lieberman. “As far as pensions go, there’s going to be a lot of continued discussions, particularly pensions that are for the executives that are quite substantial.”

The meeting for pension negotiations, which was scheduled for April 3, has been postponed to later this month.

“We hope to reach a multiyear contract that’s fair to employees … and the university that rewards employees for their hard work,” Klein said.

Contact Tara Hurley at thurley@dailycal.org.

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The controversial workforce reductions come in the wake of a recent whistle-blower report alleging that chronic understaffing at UC medical centers has undermined patient safety.

The report, “A Question of Priorities: Profits, Short Staffing and the Shortchanging of Patient Care at UC Medical Centers,” was commissioned by AFSCME Local 3299, a union representing UC workers. The report includes findings of patient-care deficiencies at UCSF ranging from hospital-acquired bed sores to an “immediate jeopardy” incident in which a patient received the wrong medication.

“No one can read that report and not be deeply troubled,” said Kathryn Lybarger, president of AFSCME 3299. “To put out a report like this and see UCSF go through with what we see as the problem is just shocking. I think it points to their priorities — layoffs don’t benefit patients.”

Officials said the layoffs are necessary to prepare for the onset of health care reform and other challenges. UCSF is working to build a new $1.5 billion hospital campus at Mission Bay.

“As national healthcare leaders, (the medical centers) must strategically invest our dollars to improve care, grow our market share, plan for reduced payment increases and lower our total costs overall,” said Mark Laret, UCSF Medical Center CEO, in a memo to employees regarding the workforce reduction.

AFSCME 3299 is filing an unfair labor practices complaint with the California Public Employment Relations Board on the grounds that UCSF Medical Center failed to comply with its legal obligation to confer in good faith with the union about the workforce reductions.

“The day I was laid off was my eighth straight day of work with no breaks,” said Celina Andrade, a UCSF pharmacy technician and single mother of two who received a layoff notice last week, in a statement to AFSCME. “I know how desperately understaffed the pharmacy at UCSF is from first-hand experience.”

The AFSCME report stated that possible resolutions to problems with patient care include legislative hearings on management efficiencies, investigations of UC staffing practices and a reconsideration of the university’s constitutional status, which grants the system autonomy from basic employment standards in the state labor code and local ordinances.

California State Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, chair of the Senate Committee on Health, said state legislators will look into allegations of mismanagement at UC medical centers.

“I am always concerned when I read about problems in a healthcare facility in California,” Hernandez said in a statement. “But to read about these issues at the University of California medical system is especially troubling because we expect more from a taxpayer-supported institution that is training our future healthcare workforce.”

Contact Mia Shaw at mshaw@dailycal.org.

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The report, “A Question of Priorities: Profits, Short Staffing and the Shortchanging of Patient Care at UC Medical Centers,” was commissioned by AFSCME Local 3299, a union representing UC workers. It draws upon independent reports and inpatient discharge data to raise questions about the quality of care at UC medical centers.

“We put the report out as a call for help,” said AFSCME 3299 President Kathryn Lybarger. “When you press the call button, you’re not going to see someone show up. That’s bad patient care, and we want to see a change.”

The report identified systemic breakdowns and violations uncovered by the California Department of Public Health. In November 2012, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center received an F for patient safety from the Leapfrog Group, a health care organization that publishes an annual hospital-safety score.

“It’s a collection of cases,” explained Todd Stenhouse, communications director for AFSCME 3299. “It’s the custodian who shows up in the room of someone who has been sleeping in their own feces all night. It’s the CEO who sees patients as dollar signs.”

According to the report, these problems are the result of excessive management costs and rising debt service payments, which have led to chronic short-staffing and overbooking of operating rooms.

Despite the alleged issues with care at UC medical centers, representatives from the UC Office of the President claim the union is attempting to gain leverage by criticizing the university.

“We’re at an impasse in negotiations,” said UCOP spokesperson Steve Montiel. “UC medical centers are consistently rated among the best in the country. This report is a tactic to negotiate in the news media rather than negotiate at the bargaining table.”

AFSCME 3299 is in a stalemate with UC officials over labor contract negotiations for patient care technical workers that began in summer 2012. An independent mediator is being brought in to try to resolve the differences.

“We’ve appealed to supervisors on the floors of the hospitals, and we’ve brought it to the UC at the bargaining table,” Lybarger said. “They’ve been unresponsive.”

The report stated that possible resolutions include legislative hearings on management efficiencies, investigations of UC staffing practices and a reconsideration of the university’s constitutional status, which grants the system autonomy from basic employment standards in the state labor code and local ordinances.

“More oversight, transparency and accountability are needed to be sure we’re meeting standards and responsibilities,” Stenhouse said. “Our singular priority is that the UC medical system put patients first in all it does.”

Contact Mia Shaw at mshaw@dailycal.org

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Together, UC Berkeley, UCSF and Stanford University will coordinate the NSF Bay Area Regional I-Node Program, one of five Innovation Corps nodes established by the NSF across the country. The three universities will use the NSF’s $3.75 million grant to establish training programs to link researchers to the business aspects of innovation over a three-year period.

“The combination of the three schools makes for an incredible asset,” said Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank, an entrepreneurship lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and the Stanford University School of Engineering.

According to node manager Andre Marquis, executive director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at the Haas School of Business, the goal of the program is to educate scientists and engineers on how to create startups while simultaneously giving them the opportunity to test their business ideas.

Blank explained the importance of getting scientists past what the NSF calls the “ditch of death,” or the gap between when NSF research funding runs out and when a team is credible enough to raise private capital.

The I-Corps will teach entrepreneurs the Lean LaunchPad framework, a training program Blank developed for his UC Berkeley and Stanford classes. With an emphasis on frequent customer feedback, the method challenges researchers to test the applicability of their proposals in the business world.

“Every team has to meet with 100 customers over the course of the program to test their hypotheses,” Marquis said. “The method is to do experiments on your business model to figure out whether there’s a business behind your technology.”

The program is a hybrid of both on-site and online lectures. Thirty Bay Area startup teams will spend three days in the classroom and five weeks watching online lectures. Teams will be expected to pitch ideas to other teams weekly and to keep a blog documenting their findings.

According to Marquis, the node also hopes to facilitate open access to research between all participating institutions across the country.

To assist researchers in bridging the gap between science, engineering and business, the NSF hopes to build a “national innovation ecosystem” of universities that would allow academics to capitalize on financial opportunities that their research offers.

In his blog, Blank noted that compressing the time for commercializing scientific breakthroughs and reducing the early-stage risks of new ventures will mean more jobs, new industries and a permanent edge for innovation in the United States.

According to Blank, commercializing science and technology locally and nationally could give the country “an enormous competitive advantage.”

Contact Mia Shaw at mshaw@dailycal.org.

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Though naturally outgoing and enthusiastic, Selezneva began to avoid the sort of social events she used to enjoy, like restaurant dinners where gossiping with friends over loud music became impossible. She would suppress questions in class for fear of repeating those of her classmates.

Not only did this hearing loss distort her sense of the world — it also began to compromise her personal identity.

Selezneva, now 26, lost all hearing in her left ear at age 6 and experienced moderate hearing loss in her right ear, which she was able to manage with a hearing aid. In college, though, her right ear’s already limited hearing capability dropped significantly, leading to near-deafness.

But now, because of a small computer imbedded under her skin and hidden by her long brown hair, she says she can be herself again.

“I’m happy again, having implants,” Selezneva said. “I feel myself coming back to the person I used to be, more focused on class and building friendships with classmates without struggling to hear them.”

In 2010, Selezneva had a cochlear device implanted into just her left ear, which electrically stimulated the auditory nerve and allowed her to hear once more. The device syncs up to an external sound processor Selezneva wears that captures noise and translates it into digital information that is received by the surgically implanted component, which then sends the information to the brain.

After getting the implant in her left ear, Selezneva was hesitant to get the same surgery in her right, worried about being entirely dependent on a machine and acknowledging the many risks and uncertainties. After the first surgery, her hearing was not immediately perfect, and voices at first “sounded Mickey Mouselike and cartoonish.”

In the summer of 2012, she decided to take the leap.

But even after the successful implantation of the device, Selezneva remained anxious. She obsessively posted questions on cochlear implant forums.

“I posted everything, like ‘I think I sneezed my cochlear implant out’,” Selezneva recalled. “And they let me know that that wasn’t possible.”

Once she felt adequately prepared to advocate for individuals going through similar situations, she applied for the Graeme Clark and Anders Tjellstrom Scholarship, to which more than 150 students also applied. She, along with seven other students, was recently chosen as a 2013 winner of the $8,000 scholarship.

Now a medical student at the UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco Joint Medical Program, Selezneva hopes to be an “outstanding physician” and improve her patients’ quality of life.

“This award rightfully recognizes a remarkable young individual,” said John Swartzberg, a professor in the School of Public Health who had Selezneva as a student. “She will bring to her career in medicine a focused, intelligent and creative mind in addition to tremendous empathy for her patients.”

He added that despite her hearing impairment, Selezneva was one of the best students in class and that he is personally inspired by her determination to “grow, progress and doggedly follow her dream of becoming a physician.”

Similarly, Selezneva impressed the panel of judges for the scholarship with her spirit, determination and academic achievements, according to Kelly Krueger, the media representative for Cochlear Americas, the organization that funded her scholarship.

Looking back, Selezneva now believes her struggles with hearing will allow her to better empathize with patients and to understand how their health may affect their mood.

“The most inspirational fact is, a lot of times, you see people willing to blame anything and look for a way to excuse bad performance and say ‘I got a bad deal in life’,” said her boyfriend, Yoganand Chillarige, who Selezneva says was instrumental in alleviating her reservations about the surgery. “But she’s turned it into a strength and has done really well with it. She hasn’t let this hold her back in any single way.”

Virgie Hoban covers research and ideas. Contact her at vhoban@dailycal.org.

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That campus spun off research stations, which grew into new campuses, and later a system, which created more new campuses, and national laboratories, and medical centers, and more research stations, and so on, with the university becoming ever more complex with each expansion.

The College of California, the university’s initial manifestation, opened in 1860 with a freshman class of 10 students; the university now enrolls roughly 240,000. Professor Henry Durant, the first institutional leader, was forced to dodge bill collectors in the street. Durant calculated the total of problematic unpaid bills, groceries, a college bell and other items to be a whopping $932; today, the UC system’s annual budget exceeds $24 billion.

The trajectory of the university, of course, reflects the parallel growth of California as a society. In the main, it is a positive reflection, underscoring the symbiotic relationship between the state and its public university. To put it most simply, they grew up together, fast and often in a trailblazing, distinctly Californian fashion, and one would not be the same without the other.

But expansion of this magnitude inevitably creates complexity. For the UC system, this is especially true when it comes to financial and budgetary matters. There are multiple sources of funds, many designated for distinct purposes. There are multiple credit accounts and investment pools to manage, along with multiple contractual obligations.

Expansion, if not properly managed, also can undercut efficiencies on the ground. For example, the university as a system currently operates 11 separate payroll systems, 10 separate financial accounting systems and six separate procurements systems: Clearly, an opportunity for consolidation and collaboration that can take advantage of our size and to drive savings into our core mission of teaching, research and public service.
This is where I come in. Four years ago, I became the university system’s first chief financial officer. It’s my job to ensure that the university is managing its financial resources in a prudent and proper fashion and also to be on the constant prowl for operational efficiencies that might be applied across the system.

In pursuing this mission, it is my responsibility as well to promote transparency and, along the way, to try to explain to the public and especially the UC community the often-complicated arrangements that come with the territory of managing billions of dollars in bonds, investment pools and the like.
This part of the job can become more difficult when critics, whether well-intentioned or not, put into public play misinformation about UC finances. The most recent example came in the form of a campaign of criticism about how three medical center construction projects were financed.

That these arrangements saved the university more than $40 million, without putting at risk a penny of tuition or taxpayer revenues, was a fact that either was not understood by those raising concerns or, worse, was ignored for strategic effect.

Of course, flaps like this are inevitable in my complicated corner of the UC cosmos. And I welcome the scrutiny. Financial dealings and the pursuit of administrative efficiencies might not radiate the luster of the university’s more laudable pursuits, like exploring the far edge of the universe or finding cures for deadly diseases.

But, as a financial steward of this public university, and also as a UC alumnus and the father of a UC student, I consider it my sacred duty to ensure that the system’s assets are well-managed and secure and also that they are being employed to maximum advantage. In the current fiscal era, this approach is essential as the university works to maintain its historic trajectory of academic excellence, affordability and access. That’s my job, and I am happy to talk to anybody who has questions and concerns about any aspect of it, however complex or arcane.

Back in his cash-strapped days, it’s said that Henry Durant would send students into the street wearing his signature top hat and overcoat. As the bill collectors converged on these decoys, he would duck safely out a side door. There is no side door to my office, and the front door is always open.

Peter Taylor, chief financial officer of the UC system, graduated from UCLA in 1980 and earned a master’s degree in public policy analysis from the Claremont Graduate School in 1988.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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The funding ratio — a measure of the program’s financial health — fell from 81 percent to 77 percent between July 2011 and June 2012.

Anemic investment returns have only exacerbated the problem. Across all UC retirement plans, the return on investments was only 0.8 percent last year, compared to 20.5 percent the year before.

Troubles with the UC Retirement Plan follow the decision to suspend employee pension contributions from 1990 to 2010 because the fund appeared to have a surplus.

The plan now faces a roughly $11 billion unfunded liability as employee contributions have yet to catch up to the cost of benefits, creating an ever-widening funding gap.

Due to the plan’s massive size, its woes have begun to weigh heavily on the university’s financial health at large.

“Changes in the pensions and retirement are really the tail that wags the bulldog of the university,” said Nathan Brostrom, UC executive vice president for business operations.

But proposals to increase employee or employer contributions in order to improve the plan’s health have seen huge pushback from unions and campuses alike.

In October, UC Berkeley Chief Financial Officer Erin Gore said increasing employer contribution rates would place an even greater fiscal burden on the campus in an already difficult time.

At Thursday’s meeting, the regents also discussed potential changes to the methodology for analyzing the financial health of their plan.

To determine how much of a pension plan is funded, actuaries estimate how much the plan will pay out in benefits in the future and then discount that number based on various factors.

The choice of discount rate can have a huge impact on the apparent size of the unfunded liability — the amount the university will owe that the plan has not accounted for.

The art of selecting a discount rate mirrors Goldilocks’ dilemma: If actuaries choose too high of a discount rate, they may mask the unfunded liability; and if they choose too low of a discount rate, their analysis may produce a deceptively large unfunded liability.

The trick is choosing just the right rate.

The university’s choice of a discount rate has come under fire from all sides with some parties, like a group of UC San Francisco nurses calling for a higher discount rate, and others, like former secretary of treasury George Shultz and former chairma of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, calling for a much lower one.

During the public comment session of the meeting at UC San Francisco, Erin Carrera, a nurse at UC San Francisco, made reference to an independently prepared actuarial report that used a higher discount rate, reducing the apparent unfunded liability by $1 billion. Under this plan, there would be far less need to increase contribution rates.

But Brostrom said he remained comfortable with the university’s choice of discount rate because it remained in line with a long-term rate of return on investments.

Still, UC President Mark Yudof appeared open to having the administration consider all proposals.

“I want you to read this material, think about it (and) respond,” he told UC Chief Financial Officer Peter Taylor. “Treat that extremely seriously.”

Curan Mehra is the lead higher education reporter. Contact him at cmehra@dailycal.org.

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A set of demonstrations concerned with higher education  has been planned to coincide with the meeting, both on the Mission Bay campus and on the UC Berkeley campus. The protests come one year after campus professor Robert Reich spoke to thousands on Sproul Plaza on Nov. 15 last year.

The protests began Wednesday afternoon with an encampment set up on the UCSF campus in Koret Quad, where protesters slept overnight.

At their meeting Thursday, the Regents will discuss establishing a limited liability company between the UC Davis Medical Center and Dameron Hospital in Stockton, Calif. and transferring the Center for Executive Education at the Haas School of Business to a nonprofit entity.

Follow a liveblog for updates on the meeting and the demonstration as they happen below.

Contact Sarah and Amruta at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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The 11-month Master of Translational Medicine degree program will be managed jointly by the campus’s Department of Bioengineering and UCSF’s Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. Program officials said they plan to enroll the first class of about 20 students in fall 2013.

The goal of the program is to “train students (on) how to develop new medical innovations into real-life clinical products such as medical devices, pharmaceuticals, (and) diagnostics,” according to Kyle Kurpinski, executive director of the program.

The curriculum is a combination of courses in bioengineering, clinical research and development, business and leadership. It also requires that students participate in a team-based capstone project, co-advised by an engineering faculty member and a faculty member with a clinical background, Kurpinski said.

“What we really emphasize is … taking something that has demonstrated feasibility and figuring out how and if it can be used clinically,” said Tejal Desai, co-director of the program, in a press release. “How (do we) get technology that is poised to leave either a small company or academia and get it into the clinical marketplace?”

The new degree program grew out of a similar master of science joint program that also emphasized cross-disciplinary work in health care delivery, which was funded by a $1.5 million gift from former Intel Chief Executive Officer Andrew Grove, according to the press release. However, the new Master of Translational Medicine degree program will focus more on professional development, business and leadership, Kurpinski said.

The degree program joins a growing number of joint graduate programs between the campus and UCSF, including a doctoral program in bioengineering and a five-year medical program. The joint programs award a diploma signed by officials from both campuses.

“We were utilizing the strengths and resources from both campuses, and by doing that, we were able to make a stronger program,” Kurpinski said. “We had stronger offerings from both universities.”

Kurpinski said the main reason for the joint effort between both campuses for this particular master’s program is because UCSF has a strong clinical focus and a medical school, while UC Berkeley has a strong engineering department.

Now, with the creation of the new degree, the program will become financially self-sufficient when the first students enroll in 2013, according to the press release. The program will receive funding through Professional Degree Supplemental Tuition fees, which were established as a means to directly fund graduate professional programs and are paid on top of students’ regular tuition. The cost of the newly created master’s program has yet to be determined.

“We wanted the Master (of Translational Medicine) for a while now, but the process of writing the proposal and submitting it to various committees takes a really long time,” Kurpinski said. “It took nearly a year, so it has been a process in and of itself.”

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