“Their whole approach to the finances was right out of the Wall Street playbook,” said William Weeks, who until his retirement in 2019 was the chief operating officer of a five-hospital chain that Ascension owns in Oklahoma. The pressure to reach financial targets struck them as more befitting a for-profit company. (Ragone said that a larger proportion of executives’ pay is based on other factors, like delivering high-quality care.) And stronger financial metrics allow the chain to borrow money at lower interest rates, enabling it to buy new hospitals and add services.įour former executives who joined Ascension from other nonprofit hospital systems said the profit-driven culture surprised them. The more money the chain makes, the more its executives get paid. The past year was a rare exception: Because of the stock market downturn and soaring labor costs, Ascension lost $1.8 billion.Īscension and its executives have powerful incentives to be as profitable as possible. Until the pandemic, Ascension was consistently profitable, earning hundreds of millions a year. Last year it paid its CEO, Joseph Impicciche, $13 million.īecause of its nonprofit status, Ascension avoids more than $1 billion a year in federal, state and local taxes, according to the Lown Institute, a health care think tank. In addition to its billions in cash, it runs an investment company that manages more than $41 billion.
#Ascension genesys hospital emergency room free#
Such a claim, he said, “is fundamentally misguided, misleading and demonstrates a lack of understanding of the impact of COVID-19 on the health care workforce.” He also said Ascension offers superior care that “has been improving over time” and that the hospital provides free treatment for many low-income patients.Īscension operates in 19 states, mostly in the South and the Midwest.
Nick Ragone, an Ascension spokesperson, denied that cost-cutting contributed to staffing shortages during the pandemic. They’re having accidents, because you can’t get in fast enough to take them to the bathroom.” “You know they’re getting their meds late. “You feel awful because you know you’re not turning these patients,” said Jillian Wahlfors, a nurse at Genesys. Other patients developed bedsores because they were not repositioned often enough. Patients lingered for hours on gurneys with serious, time-sensitive problems. Nurses said that Ascension’s downsizing had stark consequences. The Times reviewed more than 3,000 pages of those logs and interviewed 70 current and former nurses, executives and other employees at Ascension hospitals. Joseph in Illinois and Genesys in Michigan, where nurses belonged to unions that tracked staffing cuts and kept detailed logs of what they said were unsafe conditions. To understand how Ascension’s strategies affected patients, the Times focused on two hospitals, St. The yearslong effort - a combination of widespread layoffs and attrition - left Ascension flat-footed for COVID. The exodus stems from many factors, with the hospital industry blaming COVID, staff burnout and tight labor markets for acute shortages of staff. Since the start of the pandemic, nurses have been leaving hospitals in droves. It spent years reducing its staffing levels in an effort to improve profitability, even though the chain is a nonprofit organization with nearly $18 billion of cash reserves.
Nurses were so distraught about the inadequate staffing that they banded together to file formal complaints every day for more than a month.Īt a hospital outside Flint, Michigan, chronic understaffing meant that patients languished in dried feces, while robots replaced nursing assistants who would normally sit with mentally impaired patients.īoth hospitals are owned by one of the country’s largest health systems, Ascension.
#Ascension genesys hospital emergency room full#
At a hospital in a Chicago suburb last winter, there were so few nurses that psychiatric patients with COVID-19 were left waiting a full day for beds, and a single aide was on hand to assist with 32 infected patients.
0 kommentar(er)
