All Hale....12/6

I have been pondering why and how a corporation can hang on with as much red ink as has been flowing...and came up with this next bailout: Obama healthcare. For you of skeptical leanings, float this one:

If everyone is insured, then hospitals will get what they bill for (probably with reductions in reimbursement, but nothing like what goes out for indigent care. So, even MVH would be breaking even, if not making money. But, if you thought healthcare costs are high now, wait for it....

Speaking of MVH, had this comment that had to be elevated:

Mis-management at MVH? How in the world could this be possible with the dedicated leadership staff there?

As a leader/manager with a college degree and almost three decades of world wide experience that used to work at MVH my humble opinion is this:

As long as the “Hale-good-old-girl- system” (hereafter known in this blog as the HGOGS) is in place at MVH, that facility will remain the same. This means miserable working conditions and unhappy employees in some departments because of poor departmental leadership.

To define ‘HGOGS’; MVH was formerly named “The Hale Hospital”. It was a large employer and money-maker for the city of Haverhill. With a large cash-base at their disposal it seems the mentality in the department I worked in was to just get another ‘widget’ if one was broken or missing. This no-accountability mentality is still alive and well in some of the more expensive-to-operate departments of the hospital. A good-old-girl-system (GOGS) occurs when a senior person blindly supports an underling’s decisions because they’re buddies – even if the underling’s decisions may impact adversely on staff or patients.

Examples:

To flagrantly disregard a nursing standard of care or a recommendation from the infection control committee that could impact on the health and welfare of employees and guests and have the full (blind) support of the senior officer is the HGOGS at work.

Another example of the HGOGS that may be happening at MVH is the hiring of minimally or un-qualified personnel to work in areas under the control of a director because they are friends or acquaintances of the hiring director instead of going through the usual protocol for the hiring process.

Spending outrageous amounts of money on equipment repairs instead of addressing the real problem of employee negligence because the people damaging equipment have been long time employees and are ‘friends’ of those in charge - another example of the HGOGS at work.

Not permitting a department to rehire people due to attrition and insisting that a department operate short on personnel for extended periods of time (even though the department furnishes productivity data which would support new hires). Making false promises to staff departments regarding per-diem employees that may or may not be permitted to work in the short department might also be an example of the HGOGS at MVH.

I could go on but I believe I have captured the essence of the HGOGS.

I do realize (for you more critical readers) that I have a sentence fragment as the opening question of my blog – I did it to catch your eye. Grammatically wrong? Yes, but I spent my time in college working on my clinical skills – not English comp (which I still got an “A” in).

I would be remiss if I did not make a recommendation to change MVH for the better. Simply, get the good-old-girl-system the ‘Hale’ out of MVH. As long as senior leaders blindly support the poor decisions of their uninformed subordinates, morale will continue to wane away and good people will continue to leave. Ultimately, the HGOGS will be the only ones left…try to run a hospital on a staff like that!!