Here’s why Penn Medicine’s mandate matters to you.
I’m going to paint you a picture. Let’s say your local hospital decides to fire everyone in one month if they had a letter X in their name. I know what we’re facing is more serious than this, but hang with me.
Not a lot of people have X in their name. Sure, there’s Alex the ER nurse, but, honestly, he was always kind of weird, right? Let him go. One person out of thousands is no big deal.
But the problem is, you forgot about the gastroenterologist Max and Felix the pharmacist. You feel kind of bad, but again, it’s a big place and there are always good people looking for jobs.
Unfortunately, Sarah the surgeon is married to Alex, and Jack from Facilities Management is Felix’s brother. So even though they don’t have the X, they’re leaving too. They’re shocked that the organization they dedicated their lives to serving suddenly views them as expendable.
Good thing we’re only down five people in a hospital of thousands.
We’re fine.
But wait, you forgot about Daxton from HR and Roxanne, the administrative manager for pediatrics. Suddenly, it’s seeming like more people. And then, you find out that when the cardiologist Xiao got his pink slip, his whole department quit in protest. All of a sudden, it isn’t just 8 or 9 people.
It’s dozens.
Then it’s hundreds.
…what if it’s a thousand?
Lancaster General Hospital’s last publicly announced numbers said up to 30% of their staff was saying NO to this mandate.
Your hospital is about to get flooded by temporary, transient employees. When does the patient care level of the hospital get affected? Do you want to show up at an ER and get treated by 30% of staff who were in Poughkeepsie last month and will disappear to Scranton by October?
Do you?
This is why it should matter to you. It shouldn’t matter because you do or do not think the people fighting are stupid or crazy or irrelevant. It should matter to you because this matters enough to them that they’re going to lose their jobs over this. And when they do—you’re stuck sending your injured child to a hospital where 30% of the staff doesn’t know where the bathroom is.
Gosh, I hope the temp staff they’re hiring can find the AED when they need it.
Employee morale is currently so bad they’re offering massive sign-on bonuses and unheard-of shift differentials just to get bodies to take shifts. They’ve moved to a rolling hiring process for positions they’ve never had trouble filling. And the nation was already in a nursing shortage.
Gosh, I hope the wildly overworked veterans who stay can keep their exhausted eyes open when they start your mom’s IV.
It needs to matter to you that your local hospital leadership is making a decision that is going to negatively impact patient care by leading to massive employee turnover at a time when all we need is our healthcare heroes. Let your hard-working neighbors keep their jobs!
Tell Penn Medicine this mandate is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.
And tell Lancaster Newspapers and WGAL to do their only job and report objectively.
If you’re a human person with a physical body and you live in Lancaster, this matters to you.
And if you don’t live in Lancaster, they are coming to divide and destroy your hometown hospital next.
