RACINE - Care provided to patients coming to the Racine Family Medicine Center for treatment and testing of sexually transmitted diseases was not substandard, center officials said.

Allegations about patients receiving inadequate care surfaced during the ongoing termination hearing for City Health Administrator Janelle Grammer. Grammer outsourced the city's STD program to the RFMC in January 2008; it has recently been transferred back to the city.

In a statement, the Medical College of Wisconsin, whose physicians provide care at the RFMC, said staff follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, the same guidelines the city used when it ran the STD program.

"While there have been some discussions about individual patients, the Health Department never asked to terminate the contract and in fact asked to extend the contract," the statement read.

Additionally, the Medical College statement stressed that staff "do not provide medical care at the behest of a (health department) epidemiologist."

Racine Health Department Epidemiologist Jeff Schmidt, one of the people who raised the concerns about the quality of the outsourced treatment, said in an interview Thursday that the RFMC is not "the bad guy" in this situation.

"We had an agreement and they didn't follow our agreement," Schmidt said.

He said communication problems, including working out the agreement with residency program administrators but not physicians, contributed to the problems.

Dr. Allen Last, who is a program director at the center, also said the city's concerns may have been more due to communication breakdowns than any deficiency in care.

"We did hear a couple of times about their concerns," he said, "but at no point was there any suggestion that the quality of care we were providing wasn't standard."

He also believes internal Health Department political struggles - not the quality of care provided by the RFMC - was the real problem.

As a partner in the RFMC, and the organization about to take complete ownership of the clinic, Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare also responded to the circulating allegations:

"We have a longstanding partnership with the Medical College of Wisconsin and are confident in their commitment to the teaching and practice of medicine. The Racine Family Medicine Residency was built on the mission to serve the health care needs of our community. The physicians and staff of the residency and center filled those needs with quality and compassionate clinical care."

For the past 11 years the RFMC has been a partnership between the Medical College and Wheaton Franciscan. The center was administered through the Medical College, and college physicians saw patients. Wheaton Franciscan provided the facility space, support staff and the hospital where family medicine residents were able to get acute-care experience.

As of July 1 Wheaton Franciscan will be in charge of all aspects of the RFMC; it will no longer be a residency program for the Medical College.