How are employees being treated?
I appreciate Mrs. Charla Rowley’s answers to some of my questions about Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center, but I have a few more.
I’m curious to know how the Cardiovascular Institute maintained all those certifications with no surgeon for more than a year. I understand that many of the specially trained cardiac care nurses left too.
My main concerns remain about how employees are being treated. Do employees have a personnel manual which outlines grievances, warnings, employee assistance and termination procedures? Do employees have any rights?
It seems that the hospital is operating on procedures from a very dark time in history. I have a concern about longtime employees being summarily dismissed without any warning and for no apparent reason.
Again, as a former administrator of a public agency, this is very troubling to me. I hope Mrs. Rowley will explain these procedures to the public.
— Lorraine B. Gayden, Summit
The hospital and open-heart surgery
This is in response to Lorraine B. Gayden’s letter to the editor last week. She asked if the administration could tell us why the cardiothoracic surgeon left the heart center. In my opinion, the CEO did not answer that question correctly.
Toward the end of April 2021, I had one of the last open-heart surgeries at the Cardiovascular Institute. The heart surgeon talked to me extensively before my surgery.
He told me that I might want to consider going somewhere else for my needed surgery because he was having to leave the heart center in a few weeks to continue his practice because of the hospital administration’s decision not to perform any more open-heart surgeries.
I asked why and he said, “It’s all about the money.” He said that the hospital was losing too much money on every open-heart surgery and Medicare or Medicaid writes off the majority of the bill, leaving the hospital with only a small payment for a very expensive surgery.
— Randy Lang, Fernwood
