L.A. County considers hiring a permanent watchdog for troubled hospitals
The plan comes on the heels of news that 11% of King-Harbor hospital workers had undisclosed criminal records.
By Garrett Therolf, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/los_angeles_metro/la-me-employees10-2008sep10,0,1372925.story?track=rssThe Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday considered instituting a permanent, independent investigator to keep watch over the county's troubled hospital and clinic system.
The proposal came a day after new disclosures about the le vel of incompetence among employees at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, 11% of whom had undisclosed criminal records.
The investigator job was proposed by Supervisor Gloria Molina, who said trouble at King-Harbor developed in part because officials with the county Department of Health Services kept problems secret from the board.
"I think what we have is lousy management," she said, "that for some reason is frightened of telling us the truth or doesn't have the ability to tell us the truth and conjure up all kinds of interesting stories to tell us to keep us blind to the real facts that are going on. So I've just about had it."
The board directed county Chief Executive Officer William T Fujioka to return next week with a proposal outlining how an independent investigator would operate.
Molina suggested that it might be modeled on Special Counsel Merrick Bobb, who is charged by the supervisors to monitor and investigate the Sheriff's Department.
"We have a . . . safety net responsibility for healthcare, and I'm troubled every single day by the fact that we may be losing control of the administration of that safety net," Molina said.
"It isn't the fact that we don't have money, although that is one of the issues, and that we don't have dedicated employees."
The decision came amid significant public outcry over Monday's disclosure that a high percentage of King- Harbor workers have criminal records and performed poorly on tests that evaluated their competency to treat patients.
According to a report by the county's auditor-controller, 152 employees among 1,356 reviewed at King-Harbor had criminal records and the quality of nurses at King-Harbor was poor compared with other medical facilities in the county system.
"It sends the terrible message that minorities and poor people do not deserve the highest standards in staff medical care," said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable.
"King should not be a dumping ground for incompetent employees and those who commit crimes."
The full extent of the problem is still unknown.
Fujioka and John Schunhoff, the interim director of the Department of Health Services, on Tuesday continued to refuse to reveal the full extent of the incompetence and crimes among King-Harbor staffers.
When they first discovered the problems with criminal histories, Fujioka and Schunhoff did not immediately disclose the news to the public.
Fujioka orally communicated information about the crimes to the supervisors, and Schunhoff omitted the information from public records that described the county's response to human resources problems at King-Harbor.
Fujioka later acknowledged a portion of the criminal discoveries when asked about them by The Times.
The review that discovered the criminal histories and incompetence came in response to an article in The Times that King-Harbor workers were not fully vetted as promised when the hospital's inpatient services shut down last year.
Federal regulators forced the closure after determining that minimum standards for patient care were not being met.
garrett.therolf@latimes.com
My thoughts about the article above was the simple fact that it all comes down to money. King Harbor is a county hospital and thus doesn't get enough money because majority of their clientele either don't have insurance or it's medi-cal and that only pays a certain amount per diem per patient. (note: I am not blaming the patients for being uninsured or having sh*tty insurance...I personally feel our goverment has allowed this to happen...allowing companies to play around with employees "hours" so that they don't get any benefits. I mean, there are companies out there where employees are screwed over because they maybe working close to 20-40 hour weeks, but aren't considered part/full-time because they are "per diem" and they set their schedules around...just to make sure they don't get benefits and they make more profit). Gone are the days where companies and employees had loyalty for each other.
So if a hospital's source of income are coming from patients who don't have much to give, they have to cut cost some place. If you're a nurse/doctor/technician/technical support staff, you can find yourself in a situation where other hospitals/companies are willing to pay you more and give you more because they have more insured patients AND private donors. So a hospital who's on a very tight budget (yes, I'm sure all hospitals are on a tight budget) and potential employees asking beyond what the hospital can provide, well....you still have to hire people out of those that actually apply to a county job (and they may not be the doctors/nurses/etc ranked top 10% because they can't afford them nor are many applying for a lower incomes).
Although someone has a conviction, it should be handled on a case-by-case basis. Just because this hospital had employees with criminal records doesn't mean they can't have a job. If they were convicted of theft, of course don't give that person an accounting position. If convicted of murder...hopefully they weren't given a position where they had to work with patient care. I think the article needs to go more indepth.
What convictions did these employees have and what job responsibilities did they get? It looks like 65% of those wth conviction had crimes not related to their job. It also looks like 10% of convictions were dismissed by court and 20% were still in-process.
I don't think many employers would hire doctors/nurses/etc (who have direct contact with a patient's care) that have been convicted of murder. Yes, I've heard horror stories of nurses telling a bleeding patient to "wait in line". When that happens, it's because of low morale, poor social skills/customer service training, not enough emphasis is placed on patient care.
One thing I know, if you want an employee to be apathetic to his/her job...it's easy to do. First you don't give credit where credit is due. You don't reward/treat your staff as equals and you make them feel like you think they're stupid (honestly, you don't have to have a degree to know when you're being fed bullsh*t). You don't listen to their frustration, or if you do listen, you do nothing about it. You don't pay them the competitive rate...and it becomes a bad virus that spreads. Maybe a small percentage of the hospital's problem might be an employee's past. However, when there is no sense of purpose, responsibility, acknowledgement....and you see management getting paid the big bucks to really do nothing (cuz you know that the ones below them are doing the hard labor)....then you get apathetic employees who don't care, who are burned out because they've probably been treated like sh*t from management and patients....and you have a budget that maybe way below what other hospitals probably have because of the clients' insurances (or lack thereof)...what are you going to expect?
Sure you can hire a watchdog...but wouldn't it be better to just hire new management and fix what's wrong. All the watchdog will do is watch.
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