President Ann Weaver Hart addressed the Arizona Board of Regents on Thursday morning, assessing the state of the university.

In her address, she delegated time to addressing the sate of the UA Health Sciences, particularly its relationship with Banner Health.

“You did the right thing … after all that hard work,” Hart said, regarding the regents and their work toward facilitating the Banner partnership. “You made the right decision, and we are creating the future for academic medicine.”

Hart continued, saying that a major benefit of the merger was that Banner has financial stake riding on the success of the university’s medical program. This stake has already been reflected in Banner’s significant capital investments in the university.

After Hart’s address, Dr. Joe G.N. “Skip” Garcia, the senior vice president for UA Health Sciences, further outlined the advancements of the program in the past years. Garcia included metrics detailing the saturation of UA graduated physicians in the state, which totals up to 35 percent of the doctors in Arizona.

However, the discussion quickly turned to the UA College of Medicine – Phoenix, and the issues that it has been working on during the accreditation process.

Garcia pointed out that the university is in the final stages of fine tuning its response to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the accrediting body responsible for giving the Phoenix campus its accreditation.

He explained that the accreditors have given good feedback following their recent visits to the campus.

“We are very much on track and cautiously optimistic—which is as good as we can be because accreditation is a tricky thing,” Garcia said. “Our eye is on the ball with the LCME issue, and I like where we are at right now.”

Regent Jay Helier, chairman of the board, added that a portion of the issues stemming from the hang-up that the LCME had with accreditation of the Phoenix campus may actually stem from the non-traditional nature of the merger, “because accreditors don’t understand non-traditional.”

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