A GREAT HEART: WHY DR. STEPHEN CULP IS FIGHTING FOR UVA HEALTH
The first in a series of profiles celebrating our healthcare professionals who serve us. *Being featured here neither suggests nor confirms one is a signatory to the 9/5/24 No Confidence Letter.*
“I was raised in small town America in South Carolina and my dad was a minister. Your name meant a lot. Your honesty and what you were willing to do for people meant a lot. That’s just part of my life.”
- Dr. Stephen Culp
We’ve been dismayed and unsettled by how UVA Leadership and UVA Health System Board Members have publicly discredited our doctors for speaking up regarding urgent patient safety issues and matters of public concern.
We’ve been alarmed to hear that UVA Leadership has disparaged individual doctors in meetings and conversations with their faculty in blatant attempts at character assassination.
So we’ve started a CHARACTER FORTIFICATION project:
GREAT HEARTS: THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF UVA HEALTH
While UVA’s Leadership including UVA’s Chief Communications Officer has tried to diminish the significance of 128 physicians signing their names to the 9/5/24 No Confidence Letter, we would be concerned to know that a single doctor of ours signed their name.
And while UVA Leadership has repeatedly tried to discredit our doctors by falsely accusing them of being anonymous and insinuating that they are expendable and replaceable, we want to celebrate our family, friends, and neighbors as the extraordinary individuals each of them are who proudly serve our community.
We’re starting with Dr. Stephen Culp who courageously spoke up in a Faculty Senate meeting on 9/20/24 calling out UVA Leadership’s dishonesty.
Dr. Culp is a urologist at UVA Health who specializes in caring for patients with urologic cancers, including kidney, bladder, and prostate cancer. Dr. Culp is also a professor in the Department of Urology at the UVA School of Medicine.
Dr. Culp started at UVA in 2011 after completing his surgical and urologic residency training at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington and his fellowship at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.
Dr. Culp was looking for a home closer to his roots and was drawn specifically to UVA and Charlottesville out of both an affinity for the state of Virginia after attending the Medical College of Virginia (now known as the VCU Medical Center) and also a desire to work for the legendary urologist, Dr. William “Bill” Steers who recruited him. UVA’s storied Urology Department goes back to the early 1900s and Dr. Steers is credited with building up the program in the 1980s and 1990s:
Dr. William D. Steers, Paul Mellon professor and chair of the Department of Urology at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine, died April 10 [2015] in Charlottesville. He was 59.
Born Aug. 19, 1955, Steers had been on the faculty since 1988 and chaired the urology department for 20 years. His research first described the clinical efficacy of Viagra, making his most-cited publication the 1998 paper with those findings in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Men’s Health magazine named Steers as one of the top 15 doctors for men in the U.S. He was editor of the Journal of Urology, a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Reproductive Medicine Advisory Panel and president of the American Board of Urology from 2010-11. In 2011, Steers was appointed to the advisory council at National Institutes of Health by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and U.Va. alumnus Francis Collins, head of the NIH.
Steers helped found the Charlottesville Men’s Four-Miler event, laying the foundation for the Virginia Institute for Men’s Health Improvement and Performance.
He was awarded the American Urological Association’s Hugh Hampton Young Award, Gold Cystoscope Award, Dornier’s Innovation prize, Gineste Award for research in erectile dysfunction, the Zimskind Award in Neurourology and the annual Castle Connelly Top Doctors Award.
Steers obtained his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University in 1977 and his medical degree in 1980 from the Medical College of Ohio. After a urology residency at the University of Texas Houston and M.D. Anderson Hospital, Steers completed a fellowship in neuropharmacology at the University of Pittsburgh.
A viticulturist, he co-owned Well Hung Vineyard and, as his Charlottesville Daily Progress obituary says, claimed that the left pair of legs on the wine label were his.
Another aspect of UVA that appealed to Dr. Culp was that many of UVA’s doctors and faculty dedicated their entire careers to UVA and Charlottesville rather than using employment here as a stepping stone to jobs elsewhere.
For the past 13 years, Dr. Culp and his family have happily called Charlottesville home. During that time, his colleagues and patients have become his extended family…
“Especially in the surgery world at UVA with the general surgeons, specialized surgeons, and anesthesia, you get to know everybody. It's a good rapport between people and you trust one another. Not only in patient care and helping out, but also just support in particular. We go out together, we hang out together. We're not just showing up for work. At the end of each summer, I host a welcome party at my home where our faculty come over on a Sunday with their families to swim in the pool and barbecue. That special sense of community isn’t something I believe exists everywhere else. Then added to that, my patients don’t tend to be one-off experiences. For upwards of 80% of my patients, I follow them indefinitely.”
- Dr. Stephen Culp
In 2017, Dr. Culp was elected by his peers to be one of 21 School of Medicine Representatives on the Faculty Senate. Then a few years ago, Dr. Culp was elected Chair. This coincided with changes at UVA Health that began in 2020-2021 as a result of the combination of new hires who lacked previous connections to UVA and the extreme challenges UVA’s front line healthcare workers faced while managing the COVID tragedy.
As serious patient safety concerns along with mistreatment of UVA Health employees and UVA School of Medicine faculty increased and intensified over the past few years, Dr. Culp along with his fellow Senate Representatives used UVA’s recommended processes and protocols to report them in an attempt to protect their patients, trainees, and fellow faculty.
After exhausting almost every possible avenue — and witnessing his fellow faculty and colleagues retaliated against for telling the truth — Dr. Culp decided to speak up even though he knew he could be subjected to similar retaliatory acts and possibly even terminated for daring to challenge UVA Leadership.
“I had no fear about speaking up because I was being honest.”
- Dr. Stephen Culp
My name is Steven Culp. I'm a urologist at the University of Virginia. I specialize in urologic oncology, treating patients with kidney, bladder, or prostate cancer. Specifically though, my research interest is in kidney cancer.
I grew up in the small towns of South Carolina. My father was a United Methodist minister and my mother was a nurse. I came from a family of four boys. I was the youngest.
From the time I was small, I can always remember wanting to be a doctor. But it wasn't until I went to college at Emory that I started to fall in love with research.
Around the time I was finishing college, my father, unfortunately got diagnosed with metastatic kidney cancer. And he only survived about two or three months from the time of diagnosis. At the time of his disease, I felt trapped. I didn't feel like I could help him. We spent a lot of time talking there and he basically told me that if I put my mind to it, I could help people in my life with cancer. So, after his death, I started thinking about it and I felt like I not only wanted to be a physician, but also a physician-scientist, making research a part of my life and a part of my career.
Now I am at the University of Virginia and we have started a new laboratory looking at cancer, specifically kidney cancer, and why certain patients respond to treatment, why others do not.
Basically, I wake up each day with a passion to go to work. It's not just a job for me, and now I feel like I'm starting to make a difference.
What makes the University of Virginia different in terms of research? Basically, we have a bench-to-bedside and bedside-to-bench approach. We emphasize that. We have the capacity to go directly into the operating room and take tumor tissue and bring it up within hours to the laboratory where we can study it and study patients with all types of diseases to figure out why some tumors behave the way they do and others do not. Then, once we find differences, we can attack those differences and take them back to the bedside where we can benefit the patient.
We commend Dr. Culp for his extraordinary courage and integrity.
We are indebted to Dr. Culp for all he does and has done for his patients.
And we thank Dr. Culp for loving UVA so much that he is willing to put himself, his family, and his career at risk to fight for it.
If you are a patient of Dr. Culp’s who shares his values and wants to support him and share your vote of confidence in him, please email: CitzensConcernedAboutUVAHealth@proton.me
If you are a colleague or trainee of Dr. Culp’s who shares his values and wants to support him and share your vote of confidence in him, please email: FightingForUVAHealth@proton.me
What is going on at UVA Health?
We are Concerned Citizens of Charlottesville and Patients of UVA Health who are troubled by what we have heard from many UVA Health professionals over the past year.
These professionals are not only our doctors and nurses but also our friends, family and neighbors. We believe our community should value and protect its health care workers who have dedicated their lives to helping UVA patients.
A Parrhesiastes is someone who speaks the truth in a clear and honest way…
It's about the courage to speak one’s mind even when it's difficult or unpopular…to prioritize truth over social niceties or personal gain...
But speaking the truth can be dangerous. A Parrhesiastes understands this risk and is willing to face the consequences, from social disapproval to vindictive employers or even violence...
Because ultimately Parrhesiastes act out of a sense of duty.
They believe speaking the truth is necessary for the greater good and to protect the people and institution they love.