Following a settlement Tuesday regarding a controversy involving three UW Health fertility clinic doctors, two have decided to resign from their positions Oct. 31 and open their own private practice in Madison.
This move came after the UW Health clinic was slated to close earlier this year but was kept open due to strong public opposition.
David Olive and his wife, Elizabeth Pritts, have agreed to leave UW Health's Women's Endocrine Clinic after filing complaints involving the third doctor, Steve Lindheim, with the state's Equal Rights Division. Olive filed a complaint that he had been inappropriately demoted and Pritts filed a sexual harassment complaint against Lindheim. Both complaints have been dropped as terms of a settlement with UW-Madison.
Olive and Pritts are now planning to stay in Madison and open their own clinic, to be named the Wisconsin Fertility Institute.
The new clinic is scheduled to open the first week of January 2007 on Madison's west side, with in-vitro fertilization services becoming available in February.
The announcement came 12 days after the Rockford, Ill.-based Reproductive Health and Fertility Center announced its plan to open a full IVF lab in January 2007 in Madison.
Pritts added that she is anticipating a lot of patients will follow her and her husband to their new clinic.
""We expect that our first month is going to be seven days a week, 12-hour days, but we want to accommodate everybody and get everybody into the system,"" Pritts said. ""We'll do whatever we need to do to make it work.""
