West Volusia Hospital Authority,
131 E. New York Ave.,
P.O. Box 509,
DeLand, FLA 32721.
Sirs:
I have to hand the Keeping the Public Informed package sent by Ormond to the Board and intended for public consideration. It aroused some scepticism here.
The term ‘‘intro’’ and numbers below refer to the un-numbered and numbered sections of the referenced piece by Mr. Lind, respectively.
I thank Mr. Lind also for bringing forth the COME ON ORMOND piece, which being anonymous would be due only scant consideration, except that Mr. Lind evidently feels that the sentiment expressed therein is quite wide spread.
Intro :
(see it)
Patient care remained our first priority throughout.
...it is crucial for our communities to work together with us
on an open and above board basis to maintain our hospital.
1 : You won’t provide your pink lady meals.
(see it)
Volunteers provide highly valued and respected assistance for patients
and visitors at the hospitals they serve.
Memorial Hospital-West Volusia has not provided free meals to
Auxillians for more than four (4) years.
2 : You have now stopped matching your employee pension contribution.
(see it)
The committee recommended eliminating a company-matching plan
for employees’ additional voluntary contributions.
The health and dental insurance ... remained intact
3 : You cancelled employee Christmas party, &c.
(see it)
...the same benefit group mentioned above recommended...
Medical Staff graciously gave Holiday gift certificates to all
employees.
Another extra that was eliminated this year was the free coffee...
(see it)
4 : Isn’t employee appreciation still what makes a hospital run?
(see it)
Employees are the foundation of our success.
5 : We have developed a bad reputation ...
(see it)
Our community hospital’s reputation has improved dramatically over
the past five years.
Patient satisfaction continues to improve.
The volume of letters and visits from patients
expressing displeasure .. has decreased
Utilization of ... pool nurses ... common practice in Florida
(see it)
Patients’ average length of stay [in ER]
is approximately 2.5 hours.
(see it)
6 : Business is so bad that nurses are sent home in the middle of shift
(see it)
employees may be ‘‘floated’’ to other areas or other ... facilities
[e]mployees may choose to utilize their Personal Leave time
or take the time off without pay
7 : You borrowed money from a bank to make payroll.
(see it)
This is not true.
8 :
The morale at our facility is the lowest its ever been
and getting worse each day.
(see it)
Memorial’s core employees have pulled together to face
these challenges and understand the basis for the difficult
budgetary cuts made this year.
9 : The $52 million Bond money is spent.
(see it)
The net proceeds of this bond issue was ... spent, as follows:
... Refund Authority Debt $30.9 million
10 : Lind is out trying to sell 49%
(see it)
There is no initiative to
sell
ownership of Memorial Health Systems.
11 : Independent release of executive compensation
(see it)
Federal law now requires public release of IRS form 990
which includes listing of compensation for officers and directors
of not-for-profit corporations.
When considering the appropriateness of the pay structure ...
annual gross revenues of over half a billion dollars
The pay plan ... is geared towards paying at the median
level on a market comparative basis.
I suggest that Ormond adopt certain measures
to counter the concerns raised in the
COME ON
piece and inadequately addressed in Mr. Lind’s
disingenuous
Keeping the Public Informed
effort.
Particularly:
Clean our facility.
Keep it accredited.
Take care of the patients.
Take care of the people who take care of the patients.
Fix the E.R. even if it means switching providers.
Also:
Fix the executive compensation system to reduce looting.
Fix the employee compensation to retain good staff.
Open the books to prevent rumors about the financial situation.
Reduce the debt load.
Open the meetings so that the public can see,
affect,
and have confidence in the decisions.
Toss anonymous mail.
Tell fewer lies.
Quit fantasizing about building in Flagler,
Peninsula,
and
Port Orange.
Yours,
Posting of this letter is
a paid political advertisement
provided by
Judging from the employee response,
someone forgot the people who provide the patient care;
let’s just consider this a convenient evasion.
The hospital operates as a private corporation,
with books and meetings closed to the community.
Not really germane to the issue.
You couldn’t have cut them if they weren’t there.
They got cut.
One ought to take responsibility for one’s work.
We understand that the
‘‘success 2000’’ info
wasn’t supposed to leak
out without an appropriate spin being put on it,
but at this point you can probably admit that you’ve stopped
pension matches.
Except that you cut prescription benefits,
and eliminated disability, scoring a double fib here.
Again, let’s stand up and be counted.
Oh, they met in secret,
so everyone evades responsibility?
A fine gesture on the part of the doctors;
they should be commended.
Of course the statement again avoids
the issue of Christmas bonuses,
their form and more particularly their absence.
total cost was approximately $100,000
Considering it an extra instead of a workplace necessity seems
a little marginal to me,
but then computer companies like my employer run on coffee.
If you cut it out, maybe everyone will be too groggy to notice that
the claimed price works out to about $273/day,
a figure which we will charitably call exaggerated
given the price of coffee at Publix.
A common platitude,
usually offered by those who have little actual regard
for the employees.
Generally ranked with ‘‘the check is in the mail’’,
‘‘that dress doesn’t make you look fat’’,
and
‘‘I’m here from the government to help you’’,
and so is uncharitably given the
Except that it’s not really a community hospital since it’s
run in secret by a private corporation,
and the reputation has in fact declined.
Consider this one a two-fer prevarication.
I suggest that to improve the reputation,
Ormond might clean the place better,
reduce the reliance on pool nurses,
and inject some actual care into their ‘‘patient care.’’
I don’t believe this. You don’t believe this.
I have cinder bricks in the back yard which aren’t dumb
enough to believe this.
The reports I get are that one often waits tens of minutes
after signalling for a bed-pan and
clean sheets are often delayed.
Since the hospital operates in secret,
we aren’t likely to see the actual patient satisfaction surveys.
What they forget to tell you is that such expressions would
be pointless - and nearly everyone knows it.
Most members of the Board will recall hearing
from the former
head of the advisory group
about the crummy care.
Issue avoided neatly:
instead of telling us how often we’re using pool nurses
and how we compare, Mr. Lind merely praises them.
Well, I think we all appreciate the pool nurses - they
are a god-send; you need them and they’re there.
Good they are,
but they still don’t provide the same continuity of care
as staff nurses.
After which they go die or give up and go home?
Seriously, ‘‘averages’’ can be computed in many ways,
and for this one we really want the median rather than the mean
or mode.
A non-evasive answer would tell us what Ormond was doing to
handle the long waits in the E.R.
Avoiding the issue of whether, in fact, nurses are sent home in the
middle of shift.
We are led to suspect that they are, since...
when business is slack.
It is certainly outside of my range of experience for a business
to expect employees to come in to work, only to be sent home without
pay because business is lousy.
Technically, this
could
be an evasion rather than an outright lie.
Money is a fungible commodity;
one could borrow money ‘‘for supplies’’ which just happened to be
the amount lacking to make payroll.
Score an evasion here: note the weasel qualifier of
"core"
employees.
This would no doubt be the management team,
who seem to be doing quite well financially.
He may be telling the truth, more or less;
we can’t check due to closed books.
Still, this section counts as a big avoidance of the
fact that the money is gone,
there appears to be no more,
and there is no visible way to finance
Mr. Lind’s big plans for Flagler,
Peninsula, and Port Orange.
Such a statement simply screams of incompleteness.
What is missing? Well, maybe the goal is to ‘‘lease’’
ownership, or to ‘‘merge’’, or ‘‘join’’, or something else.
I’m sure it isn’t a lie, but at the same time it brings
us no closer to the truth.
True: all this and more must be reported,
though it may be difficult and time-consuming to
obtain the information,
and few people know that
it may be had.
One look at the pay structure tells us who has figured out
how to milk a ‘‘not-for-profit’’.
In fact, Mr. Lind makes Mr. Arimony (of former United Way fame)
look like a piker.
Of course he can’t come out and say this.
This won’t mislead anyone with hospital experience,
where the ‘‘gross’’ is always much higher than the real money,
because the gross is based on full retail prices which are almost
never collected.
Nice try, though.
The pay plan is, in fact, geared to rewarding those
with sufficient cupidity and enthusiasm
to loot the corporation,
and who find it convenient not to have to answer to stock holders.
Summary
Where’s the fun in
scoring all those sections if
we didn’t have a final tally?
prevarications
9
evasions
17
Tanner Andrews
P.O. Box 1208,
DeLand 32721,
from @(#)hosp9929.txt 1.0 30-Dec-1999
proc with hmac.ta2