February 4th, 2009
Abusive Bosses in Medical Fields Targeted
By James Thalmanr Deseret News (Salt Lake City, UT) February 4, 2009
Hospitals would become bully-free zones and bad-boss behavior prohibited in state statute under a bill that a legislative review committee on Tuesday earmarked for interim study.
Despite opposition to the bill by the head of the state Division of Risk Management, former district Judge Roger Livingston, counter testimony from disgruntled health-care workers who support HB224 was too compelling for lawmakers to ignore.
They heard and were given written accounts of ostensibly competent, caring medical providers being driven from their jobs and even out of the state by supervisors who induce stress in an already high-stress occupation. The hyper-patrolling and controlling oversight — which included employees having to ask to go the bathroom are far from uncommon and are adding injury to the insult in the form of serious mistakes and harm to patients, committee members were told.
Laura Sorensen, a registered nurse with critical care certification and a former Air-Med flight nurse and a state Emergency Nurse of the Year, said workplace bullying is the not the joke opponents try to make of it. She said that after immediately divulging to a supervisor that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 15 years ago, the University of Utah began a systematic effort to have her fired, effectively “disabling me well before I had any signs of being ‘crippled up’ by the disease.” She said U. attorneys immediately considered her a potential liability as a flight nurse and proceeded to keep her from working, despite her filing an Americans With Disabilities Act lawsuit and court-directed mediation in which she told U. lawyers all she wanted was her job back until her health literally — not potentially — precluded it.
Nurse Sharlene Watson said she was driven out of her labor and delivery job at the U. for delivering a baby before the attending doctor arrived and to ease an ongoing disagreement between her boss and another nurse. She was immediately placed on leave without pay. She said in subsequent hearings she was verbally and physically abused.
“People think government immunity doesn’t prevent actions in court, but I can tell you they do,” Watson said.
Livingston said if state employees feel aggrieved, “we have methods to ensure that we are as progressive and open and fair.”
He added that he didn’t want to come off as denigrating testimony before the committee, but said “in the strongest possible terms, this would be a giant step backward.”
To illustrate his point, he mentioned a 1977 citizen petition in Arizona against Daylight Savings Time in which a reason cited by signers was that “the extra hour of sunlight would burn their lawns.”
Dave Gessel, vice president of government relations and legal counsel for the Utah Hospital Association, said HB224 is “well-intended but off the mark,” noting that behavior at any workplace has never been made a cause of legal action. “This is a Grand Canyon change. To single out health care or go across that chasm is huge” in part because Utah is a right-to-work state in which 89 percent of all employees can be let go from their job for no good reason.
“Employers would see a problem and think they better fire that person right now,” he added. “This would backfire.”
Tags: bully MD, HB224, healthcare bullying, Healthy Workplace Bill, Sandstrom, Utah
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Bullying in the News, Health Care, Legislative Campaign. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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