Bad Boards, Bad Boards, What'cha Gonna Do?

There's an interesting article in the Asheville Citizen-Times (I've found that newspapers in Eastern and Western North Carolina do a much better job of taking hospitals and healthcare institutions to task for bad behavior) that takes apart the leadership at Haywood Regional Medical Center in Clyde.

The premise of the article is that the "oversight" provided by the prominent & "honorable" businessmen who served on Haywood's Board of Directors was non-existant . . . that board members were ill-equipped to handle the job and therefore ineffectual in their leadership . . . and that this led to very big problems . . . especially when it came to clinical oversight.

In this classic "good-ole-boy" model of board leadership so prevalent of hospital leadership in North Carolina, board members are often composed of hand-picked, easily-malleable community fat-cats who attend an expensive retreat a few times a year . . . but otherwise wind up sitting back and letting Presidents & CEO's act with total impunity.

In that environment, lowly employees & clinicians are afraid to report problems for fear of retaliation.

Well hello! That's my story in a nutshell at Randolph Hospital, in Asheboro, North Carolina.

My Mama actually nailed that problem on the head in a long-ago letter published in Asheboro's weekly Randolph Guide (God knows David Renfro's Courier Tribune won't publish anything that might put a bump in the hospital's road to economic dominance & executive happiness):

Asheboro needs people on hospital boards and other boards that listen to find the truth, to provide checks and balances, and to demonstrate to the community/potential in-coming businesses that employees and community progress are important.

Mama always was ahead of her time. Daddy was so proud of her for writing that letter. I remember when he showed it to me . . . he came over to the house just to give me some copies of the Guide. He was positively about to bust.

The fundamental abandonment of ethical oversight has been one of my basic arguments about the pretty-much inter & unchangeable Randolph Hospital & Randolph Medical Associates BOD's for nearly ten years . . . a period of time in which the "honorable" members of both boards blithely rubber-stamped whatever their executives wanted . . . from firing a doctor for doing her duty (without ANY KIND of due process) . . . to lying to that doctor's patients/parents about what they had done . . . to violating federal & state public service agreements & contracts . . . to throwing the doctor off the medical staff in retaliation for suing them (again, without ANY due process) . . . to SLAPP-suing that same doctor for telling the truth about her experience to the governments she served . . . to over-looking (for over five years) perjury, contempt and fraud on the part of their executives.

What's more, these "oh-so-honorable" men (and a few women lately) cannot say they did not know.

And now, they have a badly-burned and righteously-angry homegrown Pediatrician hot on their heels . . . on the Internet and telling the whole world what a bunch of lying, cheating, stealing cretins their executives really are.

Not one of these "honorable" Board members (as far as I am concerned, now partners in the crime) has apparently had the insight or wisdom to realize that what they allowed to fester and grow with their smug mill-town arrogance, ignorance & greed is not good for the hospital or the community . . . or that maybe, just maybe they should take steps to make amends.

BTW, has anyone else noticed how the hospital's ad campaign has changed from "Care You Can Trust" turned into "Technology You Can Trust"?

Could it be that because Randolph Hospital has consistently failed to acknowledge its mistakes . . . and because its leaders have demonstrated over and over again that they do not care . . . a good portion of the community just does not trust the care the hospital provides . . . and will drive thirty minutes to an hour somewhere else for care? Likewise, good clinicians (doctors and nurses and technicians - those educated professionals that the City of Asheboro keeps saying it wants to hang around) do not want (or are afraid) to work there . . . and will drive thirty minutes to an hour somewhere else to work?

Could it be that the hospital & its PR gurus & marketing "team" know it . . . so they're twisting the buzzwords?

What does that say about leadership?

Style over substance.

Haywood Hospital is far from alone. It's far past the time that the people who are supposed to stop the buck at Randolph Hospital went back to basics and got some remedial training too.

Bad boards, bad boards. What'cha gonna do? What'cha gonna do when they come for you?