Consultants can lick my Barry’s….


4 years ago we ended up with new management at our hospital, ever since then they’ve been looking for people to fire and departments to contract out, and to sell the hospital. We’ve dodged the “CEO” trying to sell us twice, thanks only to the hospital board being unconvinced a non-profit should sell to a for profit company. We dodged our CEO trying to outsource us to his preferred third party servicer. This third party come in did about a month investigation of our department what services we perform, an equipment list, and was given all our budget information. They couldn’t come close to covering our scope of work with the budget we’re provided. So amazed were they that they told our CEO we had to be hiding something, so he allowed them to come back and dig deeper. This time they interviewed the department heads that work directly with us and looked deeper into budget and time accounting software. Still they could not determine how we were cheating so they had to confess to the CEO that we had a better program than they’d ever encountered anywhere in the US (nationwide company #2 in the business) Case closed for the year 2008. It was a year long process we endured having the anal probe from these asshats.

So our beloved CEO hired a head chopping consulting group, they’ve run all their formulas for a hospital our size on all departments and the admin has adjusted manpower accordingly. Our department was always, according to their formula for a similar sized facility to be .4 FTE’s over. Now bear in mind the formula they use has nothing to do with our department, it’s basically a template used to determine direct patient care staffing levels according to # of beds, and our daily census.

Well one of our Technicians got tired of always dodging the bullet so he jumped ship a few months ago, so now we’re .6 understaffed. Using the formula we now are running 136% efficiency. Where before it told our boss to fire half a person, the program is now telling him we don’t need as skilled a workforce. Action to be taken “Examine Workforce Mix” is the exact words the weekly e-mail says. It has a purdy chart showing how good a job we’re doing and several other pieces of information. Basically the consultants are telling us become less skilled, and less paid, that we don’t have enough turn over in our shop
We have 4 people Two 20 year, one 26 year and one 12 year (me) employee. I suppose we need an illegal alien or two in our department????

WTF there’s no winning with jackasses that don’t know anything but how to crunch numbers. They refuse to look at our department based on what we do, but instead examine and recommend based on other hospitals. Our boss and bosses boss have met with these people 4 or 5 times to try and explain our department and what we do but they just don't understand and keep point at a graph and grunting. The compare our department to hospitals that either contract the whole department, or write millions more in contracts to cover equipment we handle ourselves. I don’t know…there’s no winning once you become a target for the bean counters who see a bonus check in getting rid of people you may as well move on.

Thank you for letting me ramble on…maybe barack is right I need to work for the government. You don’t see Uncle Sam trying to cut workers.

Where's barrycare when I need it?

Good luck. At least a consultant's contract has an expiration date. I worked for a company that decided to reduce by attrition. And they were fucking serious. We didn't hire any permenent staff for nine years. I guess it worked because that management team managed to stay that long, which is unusual. In about 3 years we went from a work force of 650 down to about 425. 70-75 hour work weeks became routine. I bitched along with the rest of my cohort, but most of us were hourly and raking in money at the same time. Funny thing was, after we got a new management team in the late nineties one of their first objectives was to hire personel and reduce those hours. Go figure.

We first hired a management company, they come in and cut all the middle managangers and 4 of our 6 VP's....that's right 6 dick cheneys. Well they also hired our CEO and their contract us up they left after 2 years....well over the past 4 or 6 years they've slowly hired back all the middle managers and we're back up to 3 VP's and two associate VP's and a whole bunch of new "directors" LOL.....WTF!

Our CEO makes 400+ a year and we're a non-profit that normally reports less than a 1.5m "surplus"

Healthcare is just like the rest of the corporate world, the upper 5% make 95% of the money.

Wow, the government is famous for doing that, we get a build site out here and they work 24/7 to get it done, pay exorbitant overtime and short run costs to let the building set vacant for a yr or so, go figure. Seems to me it would be better economy wise to keep the build going for a couple of yrs and save the over time and keep people workin' longer, but what the heck do I know.

Duane