Good and bad news
One of my jobs at the Enterprise-Record is to write feature stories for the Health section. Many of them are about Enloe Medical Center.
By and large, my stories are upbeat. Even when I write about serious illnesses and disabilities, the thrust of my stories is about how doctors, nurses and other staff members are trying to save lives and help patients get well.
Larry Mitchell also writes about Enloe for the E-R. His stories often focus on staff cuts, labor disputes, quality of care issues and the hospital’s expansion and its effects on the surrounding neighborhood.
Greg Welter is another E-R reporter who writes about Enloe. His stories sometimes focus on people who die at Enloe as a result of accidents and criminal assaults.
Compared to what I write about, these stories are downers.
Yet that’s what life is — a mixture of good and bad news. And that’s certainly what life in a hospital is all about.
A newspaper is obligated to tell it all.
In my dealings with Enloe, I am aware of its desire to put the best spin on things. More than once, in response to my stories, people who work there have told me, “It’s nice to see something positive come out for a change.”
But even though the kind of writing I do makes me seem like the Enloe “good news” guy, I believe in the necessity of The E-R doing stories that may put it in a less flattering light.
I know where Enloe is coming from. Like most hospitals, it’s caught in a squeeze. Hospitals bear the brunt of meeting a growing demand for care while scrambling to generate the revenue to pay for it. By and large, nonprofit hospitals such as Enloe aren’t the main beneficiaries of all the money that seems to be pouring into the health care system.
But an institution as big and complex as Enloe isn’t going to escape criticism. When you’re always in the limelight, you aren’t going to be granted too many moments when all you have to do is step forward, accept the bouquet and take a bow amid cheers and applause.
Comments
Having recently had the pleasure of an unscheduled 2 AM business call to one of Enloe's clubby little operating rooms--I think Boris Karloff did the decorating--I have lots of Enloe thoughts rattling around in my head at the moment.
The first is that Enloe is kind of like India. It is so diverse that you can't successfully generalize about it very much. Some staff are friendly to the point of magical, while some seem to have their concerns focused on the next planet over. Some people really know what they are doing and some are --I've got an old euphemism lying around here somewhere...ah, found it!--forgetful.
The board of trustees needs to get someone on with real labor movement credibility. I don't think they even begin to realize what their union-busting efforts have created.
You know what they say about hospital food? I mean besides that it wouldn't qualify for lunch at Parkview School. I was appalled that after filling out handfuls of forms about my health before my surgery, they still tried to feed me a breakfast with enough sugar and other carbs to make this poor diabetic sweeter than the Lennon Sisters.
Enloe got its expansion to go through, but I think it was a pyrrhic victory. The board seriously underestimated the willingness of the community to support construction of a proper regional hospital. The new addition, nice as it will be, ultimately means the hospital will always be less than it could have been. It's a decision that is really only comprehensible to me as a consequence of pressures that didn't get much air play.
It's true: For just about every good Enloe story, there is one that goes in the other direction. But there is a whole city full of people who want Enloe to succeed brilliantly, including staff people who have been abused for so long by the hospital's alien managers. There is some real traction for a bright future in that.
The central thought I have about Enloe is that it needs to develop a culture of care that pervades the organization. That means all of this adversarial stuff has to come to an end without people always being on the verge of losing everything. I am sure that the Chico people on Enloe's staff know what a culture of care is because I have talked to a lot of them. Can the management get up to speed on that now and demonstrate it credibly? Sooner would be better.
Posted by: Greg Tropea | April 10, 2007 02:42 AM