Hospital the Victim of Negative Mailing
Many residents of Millinocket, East Millinocket, and Medway received a very negative mailing on Thursday, May 18th. The author and sender of this document is a disgruntled physician. This physician was not an employee of MRH but rather, a contracted physician we used to cover some open shifts. His work was not completely in line with our needs as a stand-alone rural hospital. My responsibility is to provide the patients of our communities with high quality medical services that are delivered by focused, high quality physicians and practitioners. I did not feel that this physician understood, appreciated, or delivered the level of care I expect from our staff (full-time or contracted). I chose not to use this physician for any further assignments.
After we severed his contract, he requested that I provide him a positive reference for his work at MRH. As his work was not stellar and this would be blatantly false, I refused this request. The physician is now attempting to hurt the reputation of MRH and adversely affect our business.
There is no validity to his claims of a retaliatory work environment – in fact, we welcome all reports of incidents so that we can analyze what happen and put corrective action into play to prevent recurrence. No one has been retaliated against for reporting incidents nor will they be.
As for the pregnant woman he references, she happened to arrive when our ER staff was attending to two critically ill patients at the same time. These patients had life-threatening issues that had to be addressed emergently. She was briefed on what was happening in the ER and understood that there would be a delay and a bit of a wait until things settled down. She was not in labor or in acute distress. She had the option of waiting to be seen or heading to another hospital for care. She was very nice and understood the situation. She elected to leave. In normal circumstances and by policy, we would have performed a medical screening on her before she left, but the life and death circumstances we were dealing with prevented this from happening. She was seen at another hospital and did well. Both of the ER patients survived.
As MRH is an upstanding hospital, we self-reported this series of events to the federal authorities. A federal inspector came to MRH, investigated how decisions were made, reviewed our root cause analysis process, and reviewed our corrective action plan designed to assure that medical screenings get done before patients are allowed to leave. All was acceptable. The disgruntled physician conveniently left out the circumstances that lead to the pregnant patient’s departure – makes a little more sense now doesn’t it?
Please disregard this mailing and any future attempts to slander MRH. Please know that we are here for all of you day and night and will continue to deliver high quality medical services and personalized care for years to come.
I have taken legal action to prevent any further harm to MRH by this physician.
Respectfully,
Robert Peterson, MBA, FACHE
Chief Executive Officer