How to “Tear-Down” a Hospital in Ten Easy Steps

Back in 2004 I wrote an article on an outside observer’s look at the past eleven months at King/Drew Medical Center. In light of the recent developments (follow this link to the coverage in the Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-king23jun23,0,1531420.story?coll=la-headlines-california); I thought it was time to publish this article to my blog.

How to “Tear-Down” a Hospital in Ten Easy Steps

Step One: Take an already troubled, but viable, hospital and put it under the microscope.

Step Two: Fire or encourage “to retire” some of the not so-competent hospital and nursing administration staff and replace them with equally or even less competent hospital and nursing administration staff.

Step Three: Close critical units, paying special attention to those units that have a full complement of nursing staff, particularly, if that unit can generate some much needed revenue.

Step Four: Bring in busloads of traveling nurses, especially if they are from a registry specializing in staffing strikes and it is even better if the traveling nurses are from states other than California.

Step Five: If the staff nurses aren’t yet ready to quit, be sure to promote some of those traveling nurses into assistant nurse managers positions (even if the position doesn’t exist within that hospital’s system) to oversee the remaining staff nurses.

Step Six: When the nurses and physicians begin to speak out, especially to their elected officials, be sure to remind them that they must follow the chain of command – and forget all that nonsense they were taught about being the patient’s advocate and the Hippocratic oath.

Step Seven: Give a huge sole-vendor contract to a consulting firm of your choice so you can control the consultants and the flow of information.

Step Eight: Make promises to the union power structure so they “stay way below the radar,” leaving the nurses and physicians to face the critics and media attacks alone.

Step Nine: Leave the public in the dark about what is happening, and when they ask questions about the work being done with their taxpayer dollars, tell them that the consultants are much too busy working to do reports.

Step Ten: Meet in two closed-sessions (meetings where the public is not invited) and decide to close the Trauma Center, the heart of the hospital and the pride of the community – -and then tell the public that you really didn’t mean to say close the Trauma Center, because of course there has to be the public hearings first, and then you’ll close it down. Of course the hospital will follow suit shortly thereafter.