How important is financial stability?

[Sabreman]

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I interviewed at Beth-Isreal Deaconess and loved it. I also have numerous contacts from current and former residents there from my med school who ALL love it. BUT... the program is hemorrhaging money, and apparently has been for years now. They state this up front during the interview and then go on to explain how this will not affect the residents in any way. Previous residents also say that the program has been losing money but they never noticed it while they were there.

Unfortunately, when you get out on the trail and talk to other interviewees, they are all terrified at the BI's financial status. Most interviewees at "Top tier" schools avoided the BI for this reason.

1) Does anyone know why this might be important? I can't believe anyone would let a place like Beth Isreal go under (have you seen that place? It's like the Taj Majal of facilities.)

2) Do you think the program will suffer just because top candidates are being scared away and diluting the talent pool there?

I would appreciate any insight, I have honestly never thought about this problem before. Thanks!

 

[pags]

It's a Harvard program. Nuff said.

 

[PainMan]

Beth Israel has and probably always will lose money. They place concern on variety and volume of case load without financial concern, they are not and need not be concerned with making money. Like pags said, it is a Harvard program and has more than enough endowment to keep it a float. For more info try Paul Starr's book(sociologist at Harvard).

 

[AJM]

IMO, the previous two posters are being a little too optimistic. Yes, BI is affiliated with Harvard, but that does not make it immune to financial pressures. If it were the only hospital affiliated with Harvard, then I would agree that the program is safe from the financial situation. But, there are three Harvard-affiliated hospitals, and when compared to MGH and Brigham, BI is considered to be the least prestigious. I can't imagine that Harvard would be quite as willing to bail them out than if it were the Brig or MGH in trouble.

I know we were all told that the financial problems wouldn't affect the residents -- they told me the same thing when I interviewed there a few weeks ago. However, look what happened to their surgery program a couple of years ago. The surgery department got hit hard, and most of their faculty left. Sure, they kept all of their residents, but you can't tell me that the loss of the majority of the faculty didn't affect the surgery residents there.

In one of my interviews with an attending who is involved in the hospital administration, he told me the same thing -- that they will insulate the residents from what's going on. He proceeded to tell me what he meant by that -- that whatever happens, they will not fire any residents. Not comforting enough, IMO. He also told me that he thought that they were going to close the original BI hospital (the current East campus), and move all their services to the original Deaconess hospital (the West campus). That necessitates a certain amount of downgrading of services. Now, if they are keeping the same number of residents but nearly halving the size of their center, by my calculations that means that there will be less for residents to do, and therefore a decreased quality of training.

I personally will not rank the program for the reasons I stated above. In fact, I probably still would have ranked the program until I met that interviewer who spoke to me very candidly about their financial situation.

I definitely think this is going to strongly affect their recruiting this year. Even though they have always been losing money, this year they have been hit particularly hard. They are currently waiting to name a new CEO (or something like that), and there's a lot of uncertainty for their future. I know that at least most of my med school classmates have not even bothered to apply there this year because they were warned by our administration.

 

[navs]

I have some insight on the BID that may be of interest to u:

BID was about 900million dollars in debt which was picked up by Harvard this last summer I believe. The problem is they did this with the agreement their tenure with the hospital be changed from the 90some yr. contract to about 2-3 yrs!! This obviously shows that Harvard itself may be thinking that the hospital in the long run of the tenure will still be losing money, and are using this as an oppurtunity to detach from them, if needed, in the future.

I also agree, even though they are a Harvard affilitated program, THEY ARE NOT ANYTHING of the prestige of MGH and BRIGHAM. Not anything close.

Hope this helped.