UVA’s Board of Visitors has hired Williams and Connolly, a D.C. law firm that boasts it has handled significant civil and criminal matters in courts across the country and forums around the world. Their mission, to investigate claims by UVA doctors that the health systems’ CEO and the Dean of the medical school have committed "egregious acts," endangered patients and created "a culture of fear and retaliation."
Those charges came in a letter to the board, signed by 128 doctors who have been complaining about Craig Kent and Melina Kibbe since 2021. UVA says the two now agree that a thorough and independent review is needed. The university says, however, that findings of the investigation will not be shared with the public. Instead, a report will be delivered to the Board and to President Jim Ryan.
Doctors have called for Kibbe and Kent to be fired, but Ryan credits them for a health system that is, in his words, “in the best shape it has ever been in,” and he’s denounced the physicians for going public with their complaints.
“They have besmirched the reputations of not just Melina and Craig,” he wrote, “but unfairly cast a shadow over the great work of the entire health system and medical school.”
