Dignity Health: “Our values define how we carry out the mission.”
Help me understand how Dignity Health can advertise “humankindness” and the “Beyond Health” fundraising campaign, then quietly begin laying off employees fundamental to quality patient care.
System leaders said Dignity’s merger with Catholic Health Initiatives would be a positive move and not to worry. Now, due to that “realignment,” not only are some staff being laid off, local positions are being eliminated altogether.
Help me to understand how patient safety and quality of care won’t be affected as staff (who contribute to patient care) are laid off. What is the benefit to patients as top executives (who have made the decision to pursue this merger) continue receiving their exorbitant, multi-million dollar salaries with six- and seven-figure bonuses even as patient care is compromised by their greed.
The employees in the trenches (the remaining dedicated, hardworking clinical and ancillary staff) are now expected to pick up the additional workload of their laid-off peers and embrace the extra work that expansion, more patient beds, and new service lines bring. Where is the ethics in that?
“Humankindness?” Call it what it is. A sham.
Sally Twiford
Atascadero
This article appears in Nov 7-17, 2019.
“Dignity Health” is a business. It competes (hopefully) with other businesses (unless we have been so stupid as to allow a monopoly to be created). As such, it does those things which are required to earn a profit (or it will go out of business and we won’t have that health care). If there aren’t other competitive providers, why did we let Dignity Health acquire another independent provider in the first place…..that reduced competition, which almost always leads to higher fees and lower performance? . We have anti trust laws for that, though they seem to be rarely employed by our now docile government regulators in this area.
But in the end, “capitalism” isn’t a government or economic “theory,” but how things work to provide goods and services. If you’re a service provider, you either run your business to make a profit, or you go out of existence.
The alternative is, of course, government run health services. In the UK they’ve decided they cannot “afford” some services, so that they no longer do hernia repair if you’re beyond some regulatory determined appropriate age. Also in the UK, its health service can deny you services (deny you the only medical services available in the country) if you make politically inappropriate racial comments. It’s a choice.
And if you don’t like the high salaries we’re paying senior executives (both here and in many other companies), did it ever occur to shareholders to demand that their corporate officers not be allowed to also serve on their boards of directors? Perhaps we ought to amend our corporation’s code to prohibit the CEO from being a member of the board. The way you control salaries is to not let the people who earn them be part of the decision mechanism. We seem to have forgotten that corporations are to be run by their boards of directors who are responsible to the shareholders, not the executive officers.
It still blows my mind to think of Health Care Providers as Profit Centers. I realize this has been the case for about 46 years. The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 allowed and promoted medical insurance agencies, hospitals, clinics and doctors to begin functioning as profit centers instead of public service organizations. Once the HMO Act was passed, life changed dramatically here in the U.S. On a positive note, much of the massive health care profits have been used to develop new drugs, procedures and practices that have contributed to an 8 year increase in life expectancy in the last 46 years. But getting back to Sally’s point, Lloyd Dean (CEO of Dignity Health) made $10.2 million last year. I personally find that extreme, and not at all in alignment with Human Kindness.
SJW need to keep their noses out of other peoples incomes.
Aspire to succeed VERSUS gleefully choosing to impede.
Facts > Emotions