Note: this letter to the editor was published in the September 25, 2022 edition of the Toledo Blade.
A kerfuffle between ProMedica Health System and University of Toledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences, the former Medical College of Ohio Hospital, involving their 2015 clinical affiliation agreement and money?
Who could have possibly seen this coming?
With apologies to Claude Rains’ Capt. Louis Renault in Casablanca, I could pretend to be shocked — shocked — that these two institutions aren’t getting along.
But guess what?
We’ve seen this movie many, many, many times before — the old tempestuous, mercurial MCO-ProMedica relationship that now has been inherited by University of Toledo and with new actors and new plots.
Who can forget, for example, that classic film noir, World-Class Medical Center, a story about the messy, doomed three-year merger discussions starting in 1993 with MCO selling its teaching hospital to ProMedica as part of an effort to create what the MCO president at the time called “a world-class medical center?”
Who remembers that 1999 gem, Fighting’ Hospitals, a tale of ProMedica unilaterally severing its academic affiliation with MCO in retaliation after MCO Hospital closed its inpatient pediatric unit to join then St. Vincent Medical Center to create a children’s hospital?
Toledo Hospital already had a children’s facility in its building.
Sure, it’s all ancient history, but provides some meaningful context for the latest imbroglio.
For the sake of medical education in northwest Ohio, let’s hope the parties can work things out.
But it is probably too much to ask for “the start of a beautiful friendship” like that of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine and Claude Rains’ Captain Renault.
Toledo is not Hollywood.
JIM WINKLER
Gainesville, Fla.
Editors note: The writer worked in several communication positions at MCO and UT for more than 30 years and is one of four editors of the book, A Community of Scholars: Recollections of the Early Years of the Medical College of Ohio.