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Dear SLUCare and School of Medicine faculty, staff, residents, fellows and students:
Thank you for attending our recent Town Halls about the integration of SLUCare with SSM Health, and for sharing your thoughts and questions with your chairs, supervisors and managers.
As a follow-up to our April 28 message to you, we write to inform you that SSM Health and Saint Louis University have now signed a definitive agreement to fully integrate SLUCare with SSM Health.
All SLUCare faculty and staff will be offered employment by SSM Health, including competitive, market-based compensation and benefits.
Our goal is for the integration of SLUCare faculty and staff to occur on July 1, 2022, pending regulatory and other necessary approvals. Residents and fellows employed by SLUCare will transition to SSM Health employment in July, 2023.
The signing of our definitive agreement means that many of your questions about benefits and compensation can be answered.
Beginning Monday, May 9, Human Resources representatives from SSM Health will meet with faculty and staff to review SSM’s benefits packages for SLUCare personnel. Sessions will be offered at various times to accommodate clinic assignments. We will provide you with the meeting details this weekend via email.
SLUCare’s integration with SSM Health will create one of the region’s leading integrated healthcare networks with an Academic Medical Group (SLUCare Physician Group) and a Community Medical Group. It will expand access to high-quality, Catholic health care to more patients across the St. Louis region and will allow SLUCare to grow and flourish.
SLU will receive a substantial contribution that will enable a new transformational endowment for the School of Medicine. This endowment will strengthen and support our core missions of education and research, provide resources for the appointment of permanent chairs, and help to develop new state-of-the-art educational facilities.
We are excited to enter this stage of our partnership with SSM Health.
Sincerely,
Fred P. Pestello, Ph.D.
Two of the region’s largest and most respected Catholic organizations, SSM Health and Saint Louis University, are deepening their partnership to advance health equity, strengthen medical education and improve the health of the St. Louis community and beyond.
Under a new agreement reached in principle, the two organizations will formally bring together the world-class academic medical expertise of SLUCare Physician Group with SSM Health’s high-quality community-based care model to create the region’s leading integrated healthcare network. Ownership of SLUCare Physician Group will transition from Saint Louis University to SSM Health when the transaction closes. The agreement is expected to be finalized later this summer, pending all regulatory and other approvals.
SSM Health, SLUCare Physician Group and Saint Louis University School of Medicine have partnered for decades to deliver exceptional care at SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital, SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital and, more recently, at SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital. Fully integrating SLUCare Physician Group into SSM Health will provide the community with improved and seamless access to all levels of care, from primary care and preventive services to highly specialized quaternary procedures and clinical trials that can deliver potentially breakthrough life-saving treatments.
The agreement also represents a significant investment in the Saint Louis University School of Medicine to expand clinical research, medical training and education in the region.
Both SSM Health and SLUCare Physician Group are committed to ensuring a seamless transition. Patients of SLUCare Physician Group will experience no disruption in their health care providers or location of healthcare services.
“Both SSM Health and Saint Louis University School of Medicine have a rich legacy of providing hope and healing to those in need across the St. Louis community,” said Laura S. Kaiser, FACHE, president and CEO of SSM Health. “SSM Health’s founding congregation, the Franciscan Sisters of Mary, first arrived in St. Louis 150 years ago. As stewards of the healing ministry they began in 1872, we are thrilled to be taking this next step in our shared mission to ensure every patient gets the best care possible, while keeping that care affordable for the individuals and families we serve."
“The integration of SLUCare into SSM Health – St. Louis will create one of the most comprehensive fully integrated academic and community-based physician groups in the region, with more than 1,200 providers,” said Dr. Fred P. Pestello, president of Saint Louis University. “This partnership will bolster our collective goal to improve the quality of life across generations and cultures while addressing the social determinants of health that prevent our neighbors from living life to the fullest. It will further serve to strengthen the academic and research missions of the School of Medicine.”
“Working together, we can better meet the comprehensive needs of patients, as well as employers and payors who are looking to partner with health systems that can offer the full range of healthcare services, including the expanded breadth of specialists that an academic medical practice can provide,” said Jeremy Fotheringham, regional president of SSM Health.
“Through seamless access and care coordination, we’ll be able to deliver unparalleled value and convenience.”
“Saint Louis University School of Medicine has a long tradition of excellence in academic leadership, educating the doctors and scientists of the future, while advancing cutting-edge clinical research and patient care,” said Christine Jacobs, M.D., dean of the School of Medicine and vice president of medical affairs. “This partnership will expand the scope of our primary and specialty healthcare, allowing greater access to clinical trials for our patients, while we educate diverse and committed future physicians for our region, and grow our research in the School of Medicine.”
SLUCare’s more than 600 faculty and other medical professionals are experts in their respective fields in over 50 medical specialties. Through this agreement, SLUCare will become a dedicated academic physician division within SSM Health - St. Louis, and partner closely with SSM Health Medical Group’s more than 600 highly trained community-based providers with more than 50 physician office locations as well as comprehensive virtual and digital health services.
Since classes began in the fall at Saint Louis University and Washington University, six students and a resident physician have died, four in the past two weeks. Of the seven deaths, four were suicides, while the cause of death in the other three cases have not been announced. (Both schools do not release cause of death information without consent from students’ families.)
An email to the SLU community from administrators on Friday mourned the suicide of undergraduate student Sean North. North died on April 5, according to the email, shortly after emergency services transported him off campus. According to his obituary, North came to SLU from Leawood, Kansas, on a swimming scholarship, and was an avid sailor and an Eagle Scout.
“Right now, our focus is on wrapping his loved ones with support,” reads SLU’s email. “Know that we share this information so we can help each other heal. We cannot destigmatize death by suicide, ideation or mental-health needs more broadly if we cannot name them.”
Days before North’s death, a SLU graduate student died from undisclosed causes, the school's president, Fred Pestello, announced in an April 6 email. And yesterday, Pestello and Vice President of Medical Affairs Christine Jacobs informed the SLU community of the passing of a resident physician, who died late Sunday evening. No further details were provided.
These deaths followed two student suicides on SLU’s campus less than two weeks apart last fall. One student — who has not been named — took their life in a public area of campus on Sept. 11. Nine days later, a 22-year-old student, also unnamed, died by suicide in a residence hall.
At Washington University, Chancellor Andrew Martin and Vice Chancellor Anna Gonzalez wrote last week of the passing of senior engineering major Anamika Basu, who died on April 3.
Following the two SLU suicides in the fall, over 9,000 people petitioned the school to implement improvements to its counseling center. Six new student support groups formed at SLU this semester.
In a statement to the RFT, SLU spokesman Clayton Berry said additional staff have been added to the university’s counseling center, to increase the availability of walk-in support and extend evening hours.
The campus schedule has been supplemented by “well being” days, featuring mental health programming and canceled classes. Further, a task force has been formed to implement actions recommended by members of the university’s community.
“The university also opened drop-in spaces on campus that are staffed by SLU employees to serve as a place for students to study and be in community,” Berry adds.
Suicide has long been the second leading cause of death among college students, second only to accidents. A global pandemic only exacerbated an epidemic of youth mental illness that was already on the rise.
Berry says SLU “recognizes that young people everywhere are experiencing a mental health crisis and that the pandemic — with its isolation and separation from loved ones – has contributed to a distressing climate of uncertainty, fear and sorrow.”
“SLU is doing everything it can to support its students and to ensure they have the resources they need.”
A man who split his time between the St. Louis area and Ukraine, helping arrange adoptions of children with medical needs, has died amid the fighting in the war-torn country.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Serge Zevlever was killed when he volunteered to check on a commotion outside a Kyiv bomb shelter on Feb. 26, his daughters said. That was just two days after Russian forces launched an invasion of Ukraine. “He was not in a scuffle, he was not on the front lines,” his eldest daughter Alisa Sander said. “He went outside to see if it was safe for everyone else."
Zevlever fled Ukraine in the years before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and eventually became a U.S. citizen. “It was a wish of his mother that he get out and find a better, free life for his family,” his younger daughter Nicole Zevlever said.
Zevlever spoke to the Post-Dispatch in a 1999 interview about his job navigating a complicated patchwork of requirements from orphanages and local governments. “My job," he said, “is to take care of the parents while they’re overseas."
