ADVISORY

Not for publication Dec. 1, 1997 -- No. 892

News conference

Tuesday, Dec. 2, 1:45 p.m.

Room G-7, Burnett-Womack Building

UNC-CH Medical Campus

UNC-CH physicians upset with health care-for-profit trend

Concerned University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill physicians, upset with national health-care trends, will hold a news conference at 1:45 p.m. Tuesday (Dec. 2) at the School of Medicine to air their growing complaints. They will describe in detail how current for-profit organizations deprive the elderly and the sick of needed health care and are beginning to turn doctors, nurses and other health-care providers into little more than cogs in a huge, uncaring profit machine. That machine, they say, has benefited greatly from public tax dollars.

The news conference be held in Room G-7 of the Burnett-Womack Building -- the tall building just west of the main entrance to UNC Hospitals on Manning Drive. It will coincide with an article appearing in the Dec. 3 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association in which a group of Massachusetts doctors and nurses state similar concerns and issue a national call to action.

Among those scheduled at the UNC-CH event are Drs. Daniel Young, retired chief of cardiology; Jarol Knowles, clinical assistant professor of medicine; Jonathan Kotch, professor and associate chair of maternal and child health at the School of Public Health; and Wesley M. Wallace, clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine.

Reporters can park in the parking deck or use valet parking in front of the hospital.

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Contacts: David Williamson and Bret Johnson, (919) 962-2091, 962-8596.