Or feel free to pick this other example, where you make a visit to the ER at PWH for a 4 hour wait before you are seen (you have a blockage in your wind-pipe from a foreign object), but you are finally seen by a non-doctor who tells you it would be a “bother and an inconvenience to page the doctors to come in (and actually do their job)” and you are sent away from the hospital WITH NO TREATMENT, for which you are given a bill 30 days later for hundreds of dollars (for 0 treatment - you were not even seen by a doctor).

PWH sucks, period. Katie RN, if you think otherwise, that’s your ego and the collective ego of the PWH staff at work there. I hope the buyout is a big success and creates an improvement in the service and competence of PWH, even if it’s at the cost of diversity training and sweeping changes within the hospital’s policy and staff…

I offer up this opinion after a seven year record of horrible service over 1 in-patient surgery, 1 out-patient surgery, 4 ER visits for serious issues, and a half-dozen other hospital interactions, all at PWH.

My family has been to every ER in Northern VA thanks to my beloved grandfather and we’ve waited a long time in each, including Fair Oaks and Fairfax. What we found was that coming in via ambulance is essential if you are facing a real emergency or are bringing in an elderly person. We’ve waited no longer at Prince William than we have anywhere else. Prince William Hospital has been a great hospital to my family.

The political correctness run amuck in Novant’s HR guidelines is troubling, but I cannot imagine Novant coming in and making such massive changes that the current staff will want to leave. It would be business suicide for Novant to do that, and, considering how successful they are in NC, I’d think their executives are smarter than that. Good medical staff is hard to find, Novant should be paying close attention to the happiness of PW Hospital’s employees. Let’s all hope that the hospital thrives and grows, as, if it founders, we’ll all be affected.

I would encourage anyone to spend some time on this page Greg linked to for an eye opening read.
http://www.novanthealth.org/eap/daily_issues/diversity.jsp

Drop down to “Cultural Competencies Cultural Competencies and Healthcare Issues” and we discover how each group has nothing in common with the other. This takes many paragraphs to describe for each group.

Well, almost all groups. All but one. Can you guess? They got these folks pegged in only about five paragraphs. Imagine that.

Caucasian American
“Many Caucasian-Americans see themselves as the dominate group in America, even as demographics are rapidly changing.”

A word of caution here. The Caucasians are a crazy bunch. Here’s proof.

“Most Caucasians of American decent do not identify themselves as Caucasian-Americans. They view themselves as “Americans”

You may ask what all this has to do with treating the sick?
Not a thing.
So why do they put so much time, money, work and emphasis into it?

George S: what’s a “liberal corporation”? Most corporations I know about are fictional legal contrivances. Is Microsoft liberal or conservative? Exxon? Sears?

How does one ensure that a corporation is “representative” of the community in which it does business? To belabor the examples from the previous paragraph, how do those coporations make themselves representative of Prince William County without losing a little entrepreneurial oomph in the process? Can the company be “representative” in PWC and still be “representative” in Watts? Does it make a difference that this is a corporation providing hospital services? Should we have requirements that Hospitals can only be owned and managed locally by locals? Do we lose something in terms of quality or efficiency if we require that? Who should impose those requirements, the feds, the Commonwealth, or the localities?

What HR policies does Fairfax Hospital follow? I have no earthly idea. How many people outside HR ever read their own company’s HR policies.

Will the medical care get better or worse with Novant? What has happened at the other hospitals purchased by Novant? Those are the key questions.

We need to keep these sick perverts out of the medical field. If we’re not careful, some of them will end up as nurses or doctors.

BUT - the new PWH extension at Heathcote is MUCH BETTER! My daughter had a severe ear infection and her ear was draining blood on Labor Day. We went there (we were visiting my parents in Haymarket) and were in and out in under an hour. Staff was very nice, rooms very clean, everything was fast. Granted, it was a slow day (only 4 others waiting) but in general the speed in which we were seen was impressive.

Government control is much more malevolent when done more quietly and behind the scenes. That involves businesses co-opting themselves to gain favorable treatment from the government. For example, much of the bailout money was funneled through failed corporations such as AIG to Goldman Sachs. That taxpayer money allowed AIG and others to pay off the credit default swaps and other leveraged positions Goldman, which is essentially a criminal organization, took that went bad.

General Electric (which owns NBC) under Jeffrey Immelt is nothing more now than a PR arm of the Obama administration. Even in its industrial units it is pushing lines of business designed to profit from cap-and-trade, and doing everything it can to promote Obama’s agenda.

On the other hand, Obama and company chose to deny CIT Group any support (even though that firm is scrapping for life now by seeking private funding). CIT Group is a financial services company whose customers are mostly small businesses who tend to be Republican. If any firm should have received a bailout it was this company. The small firms who depend on CIT Group for financing create more jobs than any of the big guys who got bailed out.

Note the difference here. CIT Group is surviving with no Federal bailout, despite Obama’s preference that they go away. Their bondholders with bonds currently maturing have to take less than par and their stock is in the tank, but that represents the risk of investing and is not the taxpayers’ problem. However, the firm is devising a survival plan and if they succeed will be helping to create more jobs than any of the bailed out firms.

Look at the local level. I’ve posted before on the influence of the development sector in our local politics. Our own Director of Planning, Steve Griffin, described one of the big local land use attorneys/lobbyists as his “best friend” and a former Planning Office employee who got the boot because she wouldn’t play ball documented that Griffin rolls out the red carpet for preferred developers. Griffin and Melissa Peacor defend and protect Ray Utz (head of Long-Range Planning) despite overwhelming documentation of Utz’ harassment and abuse of female employees. Utz is a team player in our corrupt Planning Office and has stated his position that the Rural Crescent will be opened up for development, as the big money developers and their attorneys want. Looks like Utz’ job is secure no matter what his behavior might be.

Look at www.vpap.org. Check out how much money many of the members of our own Board of Supervisors get in campaign contributions from development, real estate, construction and legal interests.

The takeover of our formerly non-profit local hospital is one more symptom of the broad problem of corruption and influence buying. It seems that the quality of our health care is going to take a back seat to someone else’s profits, and perceptions of political correctness, just as our taxes and debt are skyrocketing to support organizations such as Goldman Sachs, and the local development industry.

This problem doesn’t end with Prince William Hospital for us locally. As the economy and real estate markets are bottoming and showing signs of recovery, the development industry is gearing up to get back in action and resume picking the pockets and destroying the quality of life of Prince William County taxpayers. The developers need somewhere to send their undocumented, underpaid workers to get patched up at our expense, no questions asked. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

PWHS, to their credit, does post the patient’s rights, and in line with diversity and performance of care, that policy (which every health care provider nationwide has to support) states: “treatment and medical services without discrimination based on age, race, religion, sex, sexual preference, disability, diagnosis or your ability to pay or your source of payment”.

As for the “corporate policy on a community institution”, there is no choice but to have them in place - it is called The Joint Commission (formerly the Joint Accreditation Commission for Healthcare Organizations - JACHO). Take a gander at the standards beginning with Human Resources H.R.01.04.01, move to Leadership LD 04.03.01, then Patient Care and on, and on, and on for about 15 pages on enforcement of diversity which comes out the Federal Laws, Policies and Regulations both for Healthcare and Labor that has to be dealt with.

If you fail to comply with the Joint Commission standards, there goes your certification and there goes your Medicaid, Medicare and other types of Federal funds. At least with the Novant policy, they put it out there so we know what is coming.

I think you are addressing a pretty educated reading group here, we understand ER protocol. Demanding copays from 1 person and not another has nothing to do with triage. I did arrive in an ambulance, the other was a walk in.

As conservatives we need to fight against not only government take-over of healthcare in general but also against liberal corporations who could affect quality of care and spit in the face of the standards of a community. Prince William is a non-profit, public service hospital, and like I wrote, we need a hospital here, but we need one that is representative of those it serves. You want a bunch of people living ‘alternative lifestyles’ touching you and drawing your blood if you’re sick or hurt? Be my guest. You want absentee execs in North Carolina turning a blind eye to outsourcing whole Prince William departments to lowest-bidder companies that might utilize illegal immigrant labor?

This isn’t about being pro-labor in some bleeding heart, anti-capitalist manner. It’s about sticking up for the community, which includes the employees, and the standards of a non-profit community institution.

Perhaps the logical conclusion would be to go back to when hospitals were established non-profit entities run by boards composed of local luminaries without recompense. Thats another Nixonian change we could overturn.