Injustices in The Health Care Field: The Suffering of Employees Out Within Hospitals and Nursing Homes

In the medical care field, a great many people hear about patients being abused by medical facilities, however, no one really talks about the grave injustice employees suffer from day in and day out within hospitals and nursing homes. Consequentially, from working within the medical field for the past three years I have seen many issues arise for my co-workers that work their fingers to the bone, and push their bodies and minds to the absolute breaking point to make sure that things are done right, but their hard work is always in vain, no thank you, no bonus for hard work, no incentives to keep the drive alive within their hearts. Thus, making the medical field appear as a harsh mistress, from within its bowels employees face many problems with the defecation between healthcare plans, hours hired versus hours forced to work, mental and physical burnouts, how these facilities treat employees versus patients, I was shocked to find that these facilities are guilty of a great many injustices to their faithful employees. 

Plus, I hypothesize by the end of this essay you might be drawn to the same conclusion as I was, so let us begin. First, we will be discussing issues between health care plans. Between nursing homes and hospitals, there are a great many health plan options out there, but which is better, which is more affordable for their employees. For Mercy Health hospital employees they use health coverage systems distributed by the BlueCross and BlueShield companies giving a low cost to their employees of an average cost of $61 dollars a month according to the Individual health quotes web site within side A on the left side of my chart, however, for nursing homes on the right side, side B they use an average or premium health plan system costing on average between $231 to $790 a month by accounting people by age says eHealth Insurance.com. By comparing the two based on the facts I’ve listed above it seems there is a major gap between health plan pricing. Thus, hinting at the first signs of injustice that nursing home employees face when versing hospital’s employee health coverage. Therefore, I hypothesize that it might be a good idea for nursing homes to convert to affordable health plans like side A. 

In theory, if I would put this idea into motion with a harm test I believe it would even out the gap between sides A and B. It might help even the playing field on where people prefer to work, however, it might hurt the facility because the cost would be more out of their grubby pockets for the facility to aid its employees, especially if you do more in-depth research on who might be funding your facility. Is it state or is it just the residents that are admitted to living at your facility from what I hear the state helps fund hospitals in Ohio, but nursing homes might be another story due to the fact that I can’t get a straight answer from my corporate bosses and I sadly can’t seem to find any facts saying otherwise online concerning funding for nursing facilities, so in conclusion, there might be a fifty percent chance of this being beneficial to employee’s, thus, in my opinion, this would do more good than harm for the employee's point of view. However, the next topic is a bit more sinister with contributing with the image above that’s because in “Many health care facilities have more than a few stories to tell about Bully Bosses!”. Consequentially, this issue goes beyond what we know in health care. Plus, it worsens as the years go by, a bully boss forces their employees to work over the hours they were hired by. If you were asked to stay over during one of your scheduled breaks or stay over to fix some charts you would expect to be paid for staying over, but no, a bully boss does the complete opposite were they cheat staff by paying them salary on weeks that the facility was understaffed and forcing their employees to work over forty hours a week whether they could get the right amount of workers in or not. In the company’s eyes, all they see is a number, but this way of looking at the world and these actions are flat-out Illegal. If these people revised the health plan like I suggested I could see this being a way for Corporate America to get back at their employees, however, if I had to defend my previous choice with a virtue test I would stick to my guns with evening sides A and B because I have slight experience with dealing with crap from corporate and I would like to believe I would be a good person by sticking to my choices of the evening the playing field. Weirdly, with the typical boss bully shenanigans, this reminds me of middle school with dealing with bullies. 

Consequentially, back in the day if you do not stick with your word. You lost to the void, or in other words, if you don’t stand your ground you become a worthless soul with no useful morals to contribute to your peers. This leads to people becoming burnouts that have lost all energy and hope that they had for the facility to improve, but sadly in the medical field, it never seems to improve. Reading through reviews on Indeed.com it talks about countless Pros and Cons about working within nursing homes and hospitals. First, we’ll start with the top three benefits with working with a hospital. One is working for a big facility is it has great benefits, lots of opportunities to learn, flexible schedule with the school schedule, but the three Cons counteract the three Pros by revealing an emotionally unhealthy work environment, never enough hours in the day to complete work, revealing that there is not enough staff to provide quality care, and the list goes on with a post about poor management makes a poor work environment. Consequentially, within this post it lists “very poor management”. “employees are not protected by their manager”, “Micromanagement”, “very poor to nonexistence manager/employee”, “lack of training for the program for new employee”, and “lack of reagents to do and tools to do your job as expected”, “changing employee schedules without prior notice”, and so on. 

Thus, revealing the dark underbelly of the Hospital medical field, but how do the nursing home Pros and Cons look? Well, the top three Pros for working at a nursing home on Indeed are meeting with great residents, working in a friendly work environment, and nice food service. However, the Cons sound nearly as bad as the Hospitals with poor salary, poor management, and swinging shifts due to lack of employees, thus, pointing the problem at poor management overall between both types of facilities. If I were to show these results among my colleagues through a Colleague test, they would sadly agree with my opinion on this. My nursing home facility has had a long history of poor management, poor salary, and swinging shifts among the nursing staff which has gone on for years, and if anyone were to ask anyone in dietary, nursing, and STNA they would all tell you the very same fact’s that have been bothering the facility for at least the past 7 years because that’s the longest anyone has been willing to stay within the facilities walls, but If I even the tables with the health plan’s A and B people might be willing to stay longer because out of the five major topics I hear around work on why people are leaving its almost always dealing with the way management handles the terrible health plan. Plus, adding to this is the fact that I see these issues at work every day with people coming and going for these exact reasons, but as I continued researching to see if these facts could be backed up by some sort of professional burnout techs. I was lucky enough to find two articles online one with the International Journal of Nursing Studies, and the other by Dr. Susan C Hu about hospital burnouts. 

The one by the Nursing study was published in June of 2017, it’s titled the Influence of organization context on nursing home staff burnout: A cross-section survey of care aides in Western Canada. Consequentially, the purpose of this study was to examine the overall burnout rate within nursing home facilities with “turnover, staff health, quality of care.” Within this study over 1000 surveys were collected by at least 30 different urban nursing homes in Canada that used a type of regression analysis to indicate characteristics and predictions of possible burnouts. Sadly, the results of these tests showed a high risk of emotional trauma. Reports show emotional exhaustion, lazy like-staff, and low employment health in the physical and mental categories. Thus, this study implies that separate care aides and poor organizations contribute to worker burnout and the same goes for hospital burnout by Dr. Susan C Hu. However, in more detail, Dr. Susan C Hu found that “high work-related burnout from highest to lowest was nurses (66%), physician assistants (61.8%), physicians (38.6%), administrative staff (36.1%) and medical technicians (31.9%), respectively.” 

Therefore, showing that there is a respectively high number of burnouts going throughout the medical field, thereby, if I were to bring these facts up to a Defensibility test within a courtroom. I believe that I would be able to defend my choice with these numbers that I listed from the source I found in front of a congressional committee to even out sides A and B health plans for these poor workers, so they can financially afford to see a mental or physical therapist to aid them in continuing to work at their respective facilities. And finally, to discuss the biggest injustice among employees within the Medical field is the way they are treated. Within this medical field, 90% of the employees “are paid next to nothing” and are extremely overworked. Sadly, I’ve covered part of these issues within the previous paragraphs of this paper, like with Bully Bosses because in most regions bosses yell at their employees daily for just doing one minor thing wrong. Employees should be treated with respect, and not like a small child that just flung mashed potatoes at the wall from the dinner table. Yelling at an employee in any field of work is a form of abuse, I can confirm this when my second boss was still working at my facility, she blamed everything on people that were not at fault. For example, if she was forced to be the cook and she burnt say grilled cheese, she would turn around and yell at us for not telling her that the grilled cheese was on for too long. It’s not our fault for her forgetting about the grilled cheese, just because you forgot does not give you the right to yell at us for your miss deeds. Plus, going back to complaints about poor salaries I have asked around about this topic at a nearby hospital to get a good comparison to see which pay is better between dietary staff of a hospital versus the amount I get paid for working in a nursing home and hear is what I found.

 At the St. Elizabeth's location in Boardman Ohio, A dietary employee starts at $9 an hour, they get about $450 to $500 every two weeks, they are given small raises over the years but compared to a nursing home. I am getting screwed because I have been working in a nursing home literally down the street from the hospital for nearly 3 years and I have not received not one increase in pay, and worse off I started at $8.35 an hour and that only leads to getting paid maybe between $250 to the max $350 every two weeks. If I actually paid for the health plan in side B I would be broke within the next few months. Plus, my facility is lacking staff even within the dietary department, so my boss is forced to pick up hours, thus, corporate is forcing him to work about 80 hours a week, sadly he is paid a salary, so he does not get paid anywhere past 40 hours. This, creates a vacuum of a boss bully and burnout situation for my manager, especially since every other month he is forced to work 23 days straight without time off, and that is against the law to have an employee work that many days without a day off. According to the Deskin Law Firm “Every employee is entitled to one day of rest in 7. So, the employer cannot require you to work more than six days out of seven”. This means my corporate bosses that are bullying my manager have no right to make him work more than six days a week. Therefore, if I brought these ideas of evening side A and B of the health plan to my colleagues in a Colleague test. I start to hypothesize that they might say that we need to do more than that to tackle the problems of Corporate America presents to us. What about the short staffing? What about our poor salaries? Fixing up the health plans is one thing, but that’s only loosening the noose just a little that Corporate America has around our throats. What about evening out the entire system? Which after putting these questions into careful thought I can’t just blame my corporate bosses, no, I must put the blame on every corporation under the sun within the medical field because it’s the corporate bosses that give the orders to the underlying fault that hospitals and nursing homes are failing to keep employees happily employed under their shady roofs. 

Work Cited: 

1. 'THE HOSPITALITY MODEL.' Workplace Justice Project. Accessed November 21, 2018. http://www.bullybosscenter.20fr.com/bullyboss.htm. 
2. Chamberlain, S. A., A. Gruneir, M. Hoben, J. E. Squires, G. G. Cummings, and C. A. Estabrooks. 'Influence of Organizational Context on Nursing Home Staff Burnout: A Cross-sectional Survey of Care Aides in Western Canada.' Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports. June 2017. Accessed November 21, 2018. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28334686. 
3. 'Cottage Hospital.' Jobs. Accessed November 21, 2018. https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Cottage-Hospital/reviews. 
4. 'Nursing-Home-Facility.'-Jobs.-Accessed-November-21,2018. https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Nursing-Home-Facility/reviews. '
5. Seven Day Work Weeks Are Not Allowed.' Deskin Law Firm. Accessed November 21, 2018. https://deskinlawfirm.com/seven_day_work_weeks_are_not_allowed. 
6. Alexander, Rex. 'How to Deal with a Hen-pecking Boss.' How to Deal with a Hen-pecking Boss |. September 21, 2018. Accessed November 22, 2018. http://rebtinfo.com/how-to-deal-with-a-hen-pecking-boss/.