COLUMBIA, SC – ED Staff at Our Lady of Gluten Intolerance Hospital (OLGIH) finished yet another required but uncompensated hospital staff meeting last week at the behest of OLGIH administration. The meeting was called after administrators brainstormed during a meeting the previous week to address staff attrition and poor morale.
This meeting came on the heels of a meeting called by higher hospital administrators to discuss poor patient satisfaction scores. The administration was forced to call the patient satisfaction score meeting after discovering in an earlier meeting that CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) would base all hospital compensation on the patient satisfaction metric. Evidently, CMS unilaterally made this decision in the previous quarter’s meeting in Washington, after being briefed in a meeting by the House Budget Committee following their meeting to discuss 2014’s numbers.
Despite the brilliant plan by OLGIH administration to call a mandatory meeting with staff, morale actually sank even lower after the all-day “team-building” meeting. Sandy Romanowski, Head of Human Resources at OLGIH, was flummoxed by the failure.
“We had them (the ER staff) participate in proven team building activities, like fingerpainting and rolling beach balls to co-workers while saying nice things about each other, but to no avail. Out of 285 fingerpaintings depicting ‘their favorite moment at work,’ 211 were paintings of the worker clocking out after a shift, 26 were of staff members drinking at gatherings after work, 24 were pictures of staff discharging crying drug-seekers who received no narcotics, 22 were pictures of real or imagined sexual encounters with other staff members, and 2 were so disturbing that I can’t even mention them, except to say that they both involved arson.”
“This situation is hopeless. I mean, we had at least three meetings to discuss this staff morale issue before deciding on our ‘team-building’ day. We flew in experts from Dallas and San Diego for this, and it only cost the equivalent of four FTE (full-time equivalent) nurses for a year. This is the thanks we get. I’m sorry to cut the interview short, but I’m late for a meeting.”
