Ward Towers Over UAMS

Something at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock actually escaped the meticulous, hands-on chancellor, Dr. Harry Ward, last week.

His face showed a stunned expression, he was left speechless, and his wife was shedding tears when a banner was lowered from the portico of the new UAMS clinical tower bearing its new name: the Harry P. Ward Tower.

“If the lights go out on the eighth floor, I know it and I’m on it. I know everything that goes on on this campus, and how I didn’t know this is beyond me,” Ward said as he relaxed in his office near the end of what was a busy day, the unveiling of the new six-floor hospital tower on Oct. 21.

In 18 years as chancellor, Ward has been on top of everything while guiding the small medical campus into one of national renown in a number of clinical areas.

In the past decade, he’s directed efforts that have added $150 million in improvements or new buildings. UAMS in a short time has attracted some of the leading doctors in the country who have pioneered various surgical advances. When Ward arrived, UAMS had no endowed chairs; today, it has 15 chairs endowed, each worth $1 million, plus several endowed programs.

UAMS is considered among the fastest growing hospitals in the U.S. in research and in funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Ask Ward how he’s done it and he pooh-poohs the acclaim, directing credit toward his deans and their charges.

“I must say, there was too much ‘Harry Ward’ today,” he says about the tower dedication ceremony. “That is not false modesty. My job is to hire the people. Everybody has worked on this. I have a strong group of deans and they have been involved in fund raising. They have department directors who have been involved in fund raising.”

Ward says the clinical tower opening marks the final phase of a clinical expansion project that began more than a decade ago. But it’s not the end of the continued physical development of UAMS.

“An exciting area for us is in geriatrics and gerontology,” he says, noting the planned Donald W. Reynolds Center on Aging that was funded to the tune of $25.5 million ($15 million for the facility and $10.5 million for programs) by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. “We hope to be breaking ground on the center in March.

“Since the announcement in February, the center has caught the imagination of so many people. And there is such a need. More of our population is aging, and I can see the entire geriatrics program at UAMS in the next few years growing immensely. We can serve as a model.”

Also, Ward boasts of the 13 patents that have originated from UAMS research programs along with the spinoff of three companies.

“It is time now for this institution to look at an incubator working with industry,” he says. “This would include small companies and large. We’re ready for an incubator and it’s something to start now.

“I’ve talked to some people, I’ve talked to some legislators. Some federal funds might be available to get this program started. Where this might be located is the question.”

UAMS is landlocked by Markham Street to the north and the John L. McClellan Veterans Affairs Hospital to the south. A little land is available westward, and UAMS is looking to purchase the block between Cedar and Pine streets to the east. But solving the problem of having an incubator, and the research park that might accompany it, may prove too difficult with what’s available in the immediate campus area. UAMS may have to look outside its close confines.

Obviously, Ward has plenty on his plate to remain busy, if he so chooses. With all the “whereases” that accompanied the UA board of trustees’ resolution read by UA Systems President B. Alan Sugg in naming the clinical tower after Ward, and with Ward’s own slip during the ceremony of describing his job in the past tense, one would almost wonder if retirement is near.

After first saying he couldn’t comment on that idea, Ward, who turns 65 next June 6, says, “It’s interesting that when I first started here, this would be the year I would have to retire. Now, there is no retirement age. I’m healthy, vigorous, and my wife doesn’t want me home. But I’m also reaching a point where I need to consider retirement. I’ve made no decision.”

The Tower

The $55 million Harry P. Ward Tower is an architectural marvel inside and out, using curves and glass and making the hospital visit easier for patients and others.

For example, patients have their own three elevators set aside from the three elevators used by visitors. Storage areas for medical supplies are centrally located on the floors and accessible from each hallway. Doctors have plenty of space for consultation. Patients have room space. All the technological advances in hospital care found at UAMS’ competitors are in place — from tubular routing of drugs from a central pharmacy operated by a computer system to specialized rooms with regulated air pressure.

“We were achieving medical excellence in a 41-year-old building,” Sugg says. The Ward Tower is 200,000 SF, bringing total clinical space to more than 600,000 SF.

While the new tower is connected to the older clinical building, changes in buildings codes over four decades led to a unique design in which there is no third floor, so to speak, in the new clinical tower. (The building’s third floor is numbered as the fourth to correspond to the old building’s fourth floor). Floor-to-ceiling height in the old building is nine feet; 14 feet is required, and the new tower has 15 feet between floor and ceiling. Where the building seems to get out of line with its older counterpart, sloping ramps connect the structures at their corresponding floors.

All of UAMS Medical Center’s intensive-care units have been moved to the fourth floor of the Ward Tower. Surgery occupies the second floor. Labor and Delivery is on the fifth floor. Private patient rooms are on the sixth and seventh floors (all as numbered; remember, there is no “third” floor). The seventh floor rooms are dedicated to hematology and oncology patients and support the bone marrow transplant wing.

“I look at the clinical tower as three-quarters replacement and one-quarter expansion,” Ward says. Where surgery occupied the old hospital, Ward sees that as small space just right for special procedures such as esophagoscopy or colonoscopy.

The med center’s old surgical ICU seemed fit for the set of the television show “M.A.S.H.”

“It was in kind of a rectangular room 60 feet long with a series of beds all separated by curtains,” Ward says. “I hadn’t seen such a unit since I interned at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. I don’t know what we’ll use that old surgical ICU for. But we’ve gone from one of the worst ICUs to what I think is the finest in the United States.”

UAMS’ maternity ward has been modernized, as well, following the current model of other hospitals where a woman with an uncomplicated pregnancy can have the baby delivered in her hospital room.

The renovation in the old clinical wing and the addition of the new tower gives UAMS about 50 more beds, bringing UAMS’s total to 352.

“We’re still one of the smallest university hospitals in the United States,” Ward notes. “We would rank in the last 10 size-wise. Most university hospitals have 600-1,200 beds.”

Most of UAMS’ rooms remain semiprivate — Ward says about 30 percent of the rooms will be private, below the 40-percent norm of most comprehensive hospitals, and some others are converted to private, depending on a patient’s condition. He says UAMS is usually at capacity.

Still, Ward had to convince the UA board that clinical expansion was necessary in an era where cost-cutting predominates and hospitals are re-engineering for more outpatient care.

“It was a very difficult issue,” he says. “The community is overbedded, and, with managed care, hospitals are downsizing. But the problem is, if you have a hospital that is 45 years old, if you are going to continue to operate, you’ve got to upgrade. Baptist [Medical Center] has a relatively new facility. St. Vincent is upgrading regularly.”

With 352 beds, Ward says, it’s not difficult for a 200-member clinical faculty to keep the beds filled.

Keeping that faculty in place was also a leading consideration in building the new clinical tower, Ward says.

“As soon as ground was broken, it assisted us in recruitment,” he says.

Attracting Leading Doctors

I. Dodd Wilson, dean of the School of Medicine, says the Ward Tower will “pay great dividends for Arkansas for years to come.”

Wilson has been Ward’s point man in luring such physicians as Ossama Al-Mefty, a neurosurgeon, and Bart Barlogie, who has led UAMS’ leading multiple myeloma treatment center.

“We wanted to have three clinical centers of excellence,” Wilson says. “First was head and neck surgery, which includes neurosurgery, the otolaryngology as run by Dr. James Suen, and the skull-based surgeries, which we’re one of the few places where you can come for that. Second was multiple myeloma and bone marrow transplant. Third is our laser program done here and at [Arkansas Children’s Hospital], in which people come from all over for treatment.

“Getting better begats getting better. This building is a building. We want to continue to fill it with people to provide great programs … It’s somebody like Harry that can put all the pieces together and make it work.”

As many as 80 percent of UAMS graduates continue to work in Arkansas, officials note.

Tapping the Rockies

Ward was a dean at the University of Colorado School of Medicine when he was selected to take over at UAMS in 1979. He says he and his wife saw an opportunity with a smaller campus in which they “could bring something” in terms of growth and change.

He notes the coincidence of his arrival and Bill Clinton’s first term as governor and how Clinton was interested in improving UAMS and health care. Max Howell, Knox Nelson, Ben Allen and John Miller were among the legislators who took an interest in Ward’s plans.

His first six to seven years were focused on taking any additional money that could be generated and renovating University Hospital, gradually changing its image from serving the indigent to offering quality care for everyone.

“We were able to get the leadership of the private sector involved,” he says. “They not only assisted in fund-raising, but many became spokesmen for the facility.”

Yet, he was faced with the problem that “you renovate and renovate, but you still have a chassis built in 1954.”

Clinical expansion began to take hold in 1984-85 with construction of an ambulatory care center, which was expanded in the next few years. Construction on the Arkansas Cancer Research Center started in the late 1980s, and the Harvey and Bernice Jones Eye Center broke ground earlier this decade. The UA board gave the OK to look at a new clinical tower about that time, then, in 1994, approved the $64.6 million bond issue funding for the tower and to help with other expansion projects.

After Sugg, during last week’s dedication, had pointed out that the new entranceway to UAMS Medical Center off Hooper Street would let patients know “that they are entering a special place,” Ward retorted: “In all the time I was here, I never found the front door.”

So he made sure he built one, and then some.