OP-ED: The toll of working in health care
The phrase “health care” in health care administration was a complete oxymoron and the least healthy job of my career, and remember, I started as a junior high band director.
That music teaching job had me in a room with 120 tweens and teenagers, all armed with loud instruments and a gallon of hormones. They pounded out “Heart and Soul” and “Chopsticks” on every piano in sight. One of my visions of hell involves out-of-tune pianos and clouds of AquaNet hairspray. I’m convinced if I ever get COPD, it won’t be from smoking — it’ll be from inhaling the ozone layer destroying output of every spray from my majorette and color guard members during the 1970s.
Of course, there were other occupational hazards: colds, sore throats, pneumonia, the flu, and digestive upsets from germs being blown directly at me in an unventilated room with walls lined with brown deep-pile carpet. (Yes, the architect thought carpeting on the walls was a good idea. No, the architect was not a musician.)
Still, as germy as that band room was, it was nothing compared to the microbial obstacle course of working in a hospital.
Like teaching, in health care the risks weren’t just physical, they were mental and emotional, too. You negotiated with overworked physicians who often blamed you for the endless rules created by all of those federal agencies: CMS, FDA, CDC, HHS, OSHA, DEA, DOJ, NRC, EPA, FTC, IRS, JCAHO, HIPAA, Stark Laws, the False Claims Act, and a dozen others that were intended to drive us crazy. And that was before you added the state and local regulators, the health departments, building inspectors, fire marshals, and medical boards. Oh, and insurance companies. Arrrrgh.
The Joint Commission once cited us for a cigarette butt that was dropped inside a concrete block in the furnace room during the Vietnam War era. Another time, the Department of Health investigated a patient complaint that they had about burnt toast. (Somewhere, there’s a government file containing photos of a semi-charred slice of white bread.) I used to think the only agency that let us alone was the FAA, but then I remembered the hospital had a helipad.
It wasn’t all reimbursement threats. Sometimes the hazards came in the form of smoke and fire, like when a visitor who stepped outside for a cigarette flicked the butt into a patch of straw-covered grass seed and set it on fire. When he noticed the fire, he stumbled down the hill to try to put it out, broke a wrist, and hired one of those “We don’t get paid unless you do” law firms to sue us for our negligence.
Over the years, the job took its toll. I have had seven stents, an artificial heart valve, an artery ream job and a hernia repair caused by damage from an earlier surgery. My medical chart reads like a how-to book for cardiologists and surgeons.
I never wake up thinking, “I wish I were running a hospital.” No more 24/7 calls about broken pipes, infectious disease outbreaks, or missing Jell-O from a patient’s tray. These days, the only adrenaline spikes I get are from scary movies, cable news, and the occasional letter from Social Security threatening my income.
It’s so much better looking back on those years than living through them again. I’ll admit, sometimes I miss the passive aggressive undermining from peers who wanted my job, screaming attacks from entitled folks, and the fact that my amazing team somehow kept it all running in spite of all those challenges.
But I can’t imagine what it’s like working in a for-profit hospital, where the only thing more important than keeping patients alive is paying venture capitalists exorbitant amounts of money made from those patients. That’s a whole different kind of pressure, and it is one I am sad to watch from my home office.
Nick Jacobs is a resident of Windber.