It was a clear morning when the roughly 100 University Health Center employees closed the student clinic, rescheduled appointments and filed into the EMU for an all staff meeting.
The May 17 meeting was the result of mounting staff concerns about the leadership of then-Director Dr. Tom Ryan and Associate Director Anne Mattson.

The meeting itself brought little resolve, but it appears to have been a catalyst for change within the clinic, health center employees told the Emerald on the promise of anonymity.
This term, Housing Director Mike Eyster replaced Ryan as the clinic’s director, and Mattson vacated her leadership role as well.
Several months before the May meeting, a ground-swelling of staff concerns led physicians to craft a letter articulating their issues with the health center’s leadership.
The letter highlighted 13 specific critiques, including:
? “(M)addening foot-dragging” about how the clinic was not either closed on Sundays or provided the staff required to run the clinic at full capacity. The center has since been closed on Sundays.
? Changes to the executive committee that limited medical staff representation.
? No action after six months of complaints about noise escaping from private exam rooms.
? Methods to highlight “stellar performance of Medical Staff” were “sorely lacking.”
Some of the issues were addressed, employees say, including installing door flaps and white noise machines to prevent sound escaping exam rooms.
Health center employees who contacted the Emerald also suggested Ryan and Mattson weren’t keeping a close enough eye on spending during the renovation project, which might have played a role in the center’s current budget crunch.
The letter requested that the University hire a private mediator to help resolve the issues.
Robin Holmes, vice president for student affairs, eventually hired private consultant Toye Honeyman to meet with health center staff on April 3 and 4 to listen to their concerns.
Honeyman returned on May 17 and met with the entire staff from 8 a.m. to noon. Following the meetings, Honeyman completed a review of the clinic and its management, but that review was not circulated to staff members and Holmes said the Emerald could not view it because it is a confidential personnel matter.During the May 17 mediation session, sources said Ryan told the staff that medical practitioners had called for his resignation earlier in the year. But the day after the mediation session, former health center physician Tim Van Ert sent an e-mail to staff saying that wasn’t the case.
“I hope you will be relieved to see that this Resolution does not represent a Revolution-we ask for change, not a resignation,” Van Ert wrote in an e-mail obtained by the Emerald.
Van Ert, along with at least three other doctors, left the health center for other jobs. Van Ert told the Emerald he left only because he found a job closer to his home, not because of what happened at the health center.
Sources who requested anonymity said Ryan was open to the evaluation, and added that he was kind and well-liked despite many of the managerial issues.
Comments Ryan made in e-mails he sent to staff reflect this sentiment.
“As we gradually emerge from the many stresses and strains of the construction project, it is clear to me that the health center will benefit greatly from an objective and unbiased evaluation of our current status as an organization and health care team,” Ryan wrote in an e-mail obtained by the Emerald. “I believe that this evaluation can result in recommendations which will enhance our already outstanding services to students as well as support and promote staff morale and teamwork.”
Ryan declined comment for this story, but in an e-mail he said, “While at the health center, I, together with the rest of the staff, worked very hard to ensure that the health center consistently met our first priority: providing high-quality, affordable health care services for students.”
Holmes also declined to comment on the “personnel matter.”
Eyster, the interim director, downplayed the connection between staff concerns and Ryan’s resignation.
“The University doesn’t make decisions where people are assigned based on a petition or somebody complaining about someone,” Eyster said.
Ryan became the health center’s director in the summer 2003 after spending 14 years at Virginia Tech University’s health center.
Starting this term, Ryan was reassigned to help André Le Duc complete a pandemic emergency plan as part of the University’s Emergency Management Program.
Mattson is working on quality control and seeing patients.
A staff satisfaction survey from 2004 shows the previous director, Gerald Fleischli, also faced some criticism from staff.
“Almost unanimous agreement that the former leadership structure was ineffective on a number of levels,” the 2004 survey says.
Despite the center’s turmoil, Eyster said he is encouraged by the staff’s dedication.
“But for some reason we weren’t working together very effectively,” Eyster said. “But we’re sort of turning that corner right now.”
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