Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
My sister is the chief of staff (read: head doctor) of a midsize government run hospital. She's one of the youngest COS' in the entire system and has been pushing hard to make the hospital improve its already good quality of patient care and healthcare outcomes. She was fresh on the job when the pandemic hit and earned her boss' accolades for anticipating needs and managing through a very challenging period.

A few days ago, a nurse on her staff who is unvaccinated came to work multiple days in a row with symptoms (obviously, this is expressly against the rules). The nurse since has been diagnosed with Covid, which she gave to dozens of patients and staff, leading to at least one death and lots of delayed/interrupted care. As you can imagine, my sister was furious at the senseless waste of it all. After handling the immediate ramifications of the outbreak, she wrote a strongly worded memo the hospital staff, emphasizing the importance of adhering to Covid guidelines and conveying her disappointment with how the hospital as a whole failed these patients.

The memo was leaked to the press.

You know what the response of her superiors has been? They've been uniformly pissed at her for sending the memo, because the optics of it look bad and make it appear as if the government organization running the hospital is doing a bad job. Someone much higher on the bureaucracy totem pole was testifying to Congress soon and it sounded like this might come up. So, instead of the organization sharing her concern and working to ensure that patient safety and quality of care is paramount (and figure out how to get everyone to agree to get vaccinated), they are crucifying her for daring to raise this issue with the staff.

She's ready to quit, which would mean that an incredibly passionate and talented physician would be hounded out of an important role because of ass covering bureaucrats.
So... now she is attending a meeting with her bosses and the two senator's staff to talk about statewide Covid protocols in this hospital system, and is getting a lot of criticism from various bosses several levels above her. (As if senators have any useful input into public health.)

But you know what's crazy? At the same time as this whole mess, the head chief of staff in the national system invited my sister to speak to all of this organization's chiefs of staff in the entire country, including the full text of her email, with her being held up as a model for how to address these kinds of issues. And some of the national leadership thinks she did a great job implementing their big system-wide risk reduction strategy in this case.

It's literally Jekyll and Hyde, with half of the system (fortunately, the right half) thinking she's the bee's knees, and the other half having an aneurysm about the potential PR problem.