the scarlet letter

Think back to high school lit. The copy of The Scarlet Letter I read was a Penguin Classic, so it was mostly black with a few letters and a big red A. It’s 1642, and Hester Prynne is standing on a scaffold in the center of town, facing public humiliation. She made a choice that conflicted with the prevailing cultural ethics of the time and is sentenced to wear a giant red A to define her as an adulteress for the rest of her life.

The sentence of shunning and the false morality are both delivered courtesy of the colony’s three government leaders: the reverend, the minister, and the governor.

But good news—the Puritan colony survives beautifully, because community oppression works! The self-righteous townspeople are so giddy to participate in the shaming and ostracization of Hester and her daughter that the sin-spread their leaders swore was coming never happens! The shame-bullies win!

No wait.

I think… maybe that wasn’t Nathaniel Hawthorne’s point.

Many of you can attest from personal experience that if you make one choice that conflicts with the capriciously unpredictable morality of the culture, everyone else is so pleased to judge a new penultimate sin that they happily join in the shame show.

It doesn’t matter that you’re a pack-a-day smoker right now, if you make *that one good choice*. You are a picture of health. America thanks you!

It doesn’t matter if you weigh 450 pounds, if you make *that one good choice*. You are helping to keep America’s hospital beds empty! You have made excellent choices to care for your body! Thank you!

It doesn’t matter if you let your potty-mouthed elementary-age children watch R-rated movies, play violent video games 4 hours a day, eat Hot Pockets dipped in Mountain Dew for breakfast, or have played tackle football since age 7. If you took your 12-year-old for *that one good choice*, you’re America’s parent of the year! Thank you for raising the next generation properly!

Honestly, worse than that hypocrisy is the opposite.

If doesn’t matter if you worked extras shifts as a “healthcare hero” through the worst months of 2020, if you have any hesitancy about making *that one mandated choice*, you’re unequivocally a selfish monster.

It doesn’t matter if you have a beloved family member who experienced a terribly unfortunate reaction after making *that one good choice*, if you have nerves about taking *that one mandated choice*, you’re unequivocally a selfish monster.

If doesn’t matter if you have a history of Bell’s Palsy or Guillain-Barre syndrome. If you feel anxiety about those life-altering conditions returning with *that one mandated choice*, you’re unequivocally a selfish monster.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a pregnant or breastfeeding mother who’s avoided sushi, soft cheeses, lunch meat, sleeping on your right side, and maybe has a history of miscarriage or infant death and wants to try and do everything 100% naturally because you just feel emotionally you can’t handle any more unknowns. If you haven’t made *that one mandated choice*, you’re unequivocally a selfish monster.

Just as a random example, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been a foster parent for eight+ years, taking medically needy children into your home for the better part of a decade, including a preemie addicted to cocaine and a NICU baby whose intestines were formed on the outside of their abdomen and a newborn who has hyperinsulinism among others. If you haven’t made *that one mandated choice* because you feel like you’d be more comfortable with a longer trial period and more transparent reaction-reporting procedures, you’re unequivocally a selfish monster who should never have gone into a career in healthcare.

(Obviously, this is a hypothetical.)

The simple fact is that if the townspeople hadn’t participated, the government would have never been able to ruin Hester’s life. Three people condemning her from the front of the crowd didn’t make her life hell, the people IN the crowd did.

If the townspeople hadn’t participated in shunning her for her personal choice, the government squawking would have amounted to nothing. But the people did participate, gladly. They literally took the shirt off her back to label her as unwanted, undesirable, the worst of society.

So, hey, if this is you—congratulations on being part of the angry mob that puts real people on the scaffold in town square (or on social media or in your family) because of your ever-changing, ever-evolving, goalpost-moving false morality.

If you took an honest look at yourself, I bet you’d find out why you’re so delighted that ‘those people’ are the current subject of societal disdain.

Because at least it isn’t you.

Yet.

Lancaster Newspapers is putting your family in danger by refusing to report how bad things have gotten at LGH.

Yesterday, the Lancaster Newspapers’ propaganda machine reports that LGH’s vaccine mandate has ‘worked.’ They are celebrating that—by removing the basic right to medical freedom and bodily autonomy from their staff—they have raised the vaccination rate from 66% to 98%! Yay for tyranny! But even though the headline is a lie (we call it clickbait now to call a lie a nicer word), even the article admits all they’ve done is given out hundreds of medical and religious waivers just to keep the doors open. Their mandate may have increased under-duress, violation-of-medical-ethics vaccinations – but the true results of the mandate are increased (1) quitting and (2) exemptions to vaccine mandates. It has also (1) decreased morale and (2) decreased their ability to deliver quality patient care.

LGH decimated their staff volume massively to get to this high-pitched, headline-screeching 97.5% rate. And, the devastating exodus continues. Here’s the graph I showed you at the beginning of August with an update added. It’s so much worse than I would have even feared. Do you see that the first jump shows a time change of 26 weeks (half a year) and the second jump is over less than three weeks? You and your sick child are going to walk into the doors of LGH when you need help and find a ghost town.

Do you see all the open jobs? LGH’s new mafia enforcer CEO and his gangster hitmen have been running all the undesirables out of the hospital. They are ridding LGH of those losers we don’t want: the three-decades-experienced pediatric nurses, the four-decades-of-service-heart-of-gold dining services staffer, the 15-year veteran of non-invasive cardiology, and the beloved gerontology nurse practitioner – you know, all the gross ‘non-compliant’ people who don’t want to show their papers to come to work. All the nut jobs, the conspiracy theorists who have read… um… any history book, ever, and see that we should all know it’s a bad plan to allow someone to control your freedom over your own body.

Read the article for the quote from the expert who says, “This is not the way to raise vaccination rates,” then goes on to add that “a staffing shortage exacerbated by the pandemic means the loss of a single employee could be disastrous.” And yet, we are supposed to celebrate that this is precisely what they are doing at the hospital you’ll need if your daughter wrecks her bike, if your mom finds a lump in her breast, or your pastor starts experiencing chest pain.

This mandate of Penn’s that LGH is blindly swallowing is making Lancaster a more dangerous place to live, to work, to raise a family. The patient care level at our hospital is suffering because of their politics. The mandatory-leave papers were distributed last week in advance of the mass firings. How many nurses, how many wound care specialists, how many behavioral health counselors, how many technologists, how many phlebotomists have their last day of service on Tuesday? How many more will leave as the stampede continues?

And the big question: how long will you let this go on before you tell LGH to grow a backbone and stand up for our healthcare workers?

Here’s what you need to do.

• Bang on the bully-in-chief’s door and tell him his New Orleans mafia tactics are not welcome here. Tell him we know that Penn Medicine brought him in as a big-city enforcer to get backwoods little Lancaster to crumble. But we are standing, in his line of fire, together anyway.

• Don’t let LGH’s upper management and board continue to be spineless. Jan Bergen, LGH’s former CEO, worked in the ranks here and used to come to staff huddles. Now, their ivory tower leadership hides and ducks any staff contact, cancelling meetings and refusing phone calls.

If you’re reading this, you went to school with someone in leadership at LGH. You’re friends on Facebook. You golf with somebody on the LGH board. You go to church with their Director of XYZ. Your son plays on the same soccer team as the daughter of their Manager of something-of-other. TELL THEM WHAT YOU THINK. SPEAK UP. REMIND THEM THAT THEY ARE IN THIS POSITION TO KEEP OUR COMMUNITY SAFE, AND A SAFE COMMUNITY HAS A WELL-STAFFED HOSPITAL NOT A SKELETON CREW THAT CAN BARELY KEEP THE LIGHTS ON.

• Demand Lancaster Newspapers actually do their job as journalists.

If you’re a local, you are going to wind up at LGH or another Penn facility at some point – whether you have COVID, a car accident, cancer, or a baby to deliver – and you’re going to pay the price for not speaking up. This mandate is destroying our hospital, and your silence is letting them destroy Lancaster’s healthcare quality a piece at a time.

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LG Leaders Contact Info

Alex Jorgensen, Chief of Human Resources
alexandra.jorgensen@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-1210

John Lines, PR Director
john.lines@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5054

Mike Ripchinski, Chief Clinical Officer
michael.ripchinski@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5817

Stacey Youcis, Chief of Hospital Operations
stacey.youcis@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5007

Note: You’ll see above, I’m saying may have increased vaccination rates, because they haven’t actually told us if there’s been a vaccination rate change. They’ve reported there’s a change in the rate of ‘compliance,’ a number they admit includes all those who been granted exemptions and remain unvaccinated.

Competitors are reaping the benefits of the massive LGH staff exodus

I don’t think Lancaster General Hospital’s new out-of-town and out-of-touch leaders get out of bed in the morning determined to run your hometown hospital into the ground.

But that’s what they’re doing.

Here’s how: local competitors are reaping the benefits of LGH attacking and destroying itself from the inside.

When you’re on a fake moral crusade, business sense goes out the window.

I showed you last time how bad LGH’s hiring catastrophe has become, but that was an internal look. Now we’re going to look at the bigger picture, and ask, what’s the rest of the central PA health system doing?

Anecdotal wisdom has led a lot of people to say things like, “Boy, Hershey and Ephrata are lucky that we’re handing them all these good nurses,” or, “I guess Penn State’s gonna have an easy time staffing their new hospital in Landisville.”

Is that true? Let’s compare LGH’s situation to the local competitors that, unlike bullying Penn Medicine, have thus far refused to label a huge percentage of their own healthcare professionals as miseducated, foolish, or irresponsible.

Again, courtesy of the nonprofit internet Wayback Machine, this is all publicly available and verifiable information. (Links at the end.) Here is LGH compared to the four closest hospitals of (somewhat) similar size.

Since early 2021, LGH has now almost doubled in its need for employees. (rubs eyes and looks again)

One of these things is not like the others. It doesn’t appear that the economy or the strange worldwide circumstances can be blamed. No one else seems to be experiencing a stampede out the door… In fact, Hershey has 486 LESS openings than they did before LGH ordained this mandate.

Shoot. That’s awfully telling.

But, to be fair, these facilities are not the same size, so let’s look at the data as percentages instead of hard numbers.

(Gasp) What’s happened to LGH’s competitors? My goodness, it’s almost as though these other hospitals know something Penn Medicine doesn’t. It’s almost like Hershey in particular is suddenly experiencing an influx of talented, educated healthcare professionals to fill all their available positions!

What could this source be? What secret do they know that LGH does not?

Where, oh where, are they getting all these registered nurses? Where, oh where, are they finding all these surgical techs? Where, oh where, are they getting LPNs, care managers, laundry workers, clinical research coordinators, lab supervisors, transporters, medical assistants, and utility plant operations mechanics?

Where could LGH’s competitors be getting all these great employees?

Generally accepted business wisdom will confirm an organization’s people are its most important asset. Even at the best restaurant, food isn’t going to prepare and serve itself. Even at Apple or HP, technology doesn’t sell itself. No matter what state-of-the-art medical equipment you put in a building, that plastic isn’t going to treat patients without skilled healthcare professionals.

People matter. More than just bodies in a space, well-trained, dedicated employees matter the most to move the needle from good to great.

Lancaster General Hospital must stop throwing away many well-trained, dedicated employees. These are the nurses who made this place a MAGNET hospital. These are the staffers who were recognized for the US News & World Report Ranking, the Blue Distinction, the OSHA VPP, and the Joint Commission Certification. These are the people who built the LGH legacy.

Why is middle management bullying x-ray techs, security team members, dining services staffers, phlebotomists, housekeepers, and nurses out through a mandate designed to limit an educated healthcare professional’s autonomy over his/her own body?

I hope you like driving to Ephrata, York, or Hershey for care because LGH’s talent pool is shrinking by the day.

Lancaster, you deserve better from your hospital. Tell LGH that Penn Medicine’s mandate has got to go.

Use the phone numbers and email addresses I’m giving you, and get involved to support the legal defense fund for the healthcare workers who want to maintain bodily autonomy.

And, once more, because some of you are still reading what you imagine to be here instead of what is actually here: I am NOT advocating for or against any medicine or medical procedure. I am NOT suggesting we take away anything people need or give them something they don’t want. I am explaining to the spineless leaders at my local hospital with numbers and pretty charts that it is a bad business decision for LGH to be hemorrhaging valuable employees to their competitors. 

Wayback Machine Links

LGH (archived by Wayback on Feb. 4, 20210)

WellSpan Ephrata (archived by Wayback on Jan. 21, 2021)

WellSpan York (archived by Wayback on Jan. 24, 2021)

Penn State Hershey (archived by Wayback on April 23, 2021)

UPMC York (archived by Wayback on Jan. 25, 2021)

If you want to know what the internet Wayback machine is, do not email me and ask. Read this.

Current hiring numbers were accessed on Aug. 13, 2021

LGH

WellSpan Ephrata

WellSpan York

Penn State Hershey

UPMC York

LG Leaders Contact Info

Alex Jorgensen, Chief of Human Resources
alexandra.jorgensen@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-1210

John Lines, PR Director
john.lines@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5054

Mike Ripchinski, Chief Clinical Officer
michael.ripchinski@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5817

Stacey Youcis, Chief of Hospital Operations
stacey.youcis@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5007

Lancaster General Hospital is hemorrhaging employees, and it should scare you.

Let me start at the beginning.

Because of Penn Medicine’s irresponsible mandate that violates a primary principle of medical ethics—that no one should be coerced to receive a medical procedure—Lancaster General Hospital is bleeding employees. Let me help my fellow Lancaster County residents visualize how much worse it’s going to get if our community doesn’t speak up and convince them to back off this foolish malarky. You need to make noise to get them to listen.

I’ll start.

Hey Penn Medicine leadership: your mandate is going to destroy the hometown hospital we’ve relied on for generations.

Courtesy of the nonprofit Wayback Machine, here’s a comparison of open positions in a few categories at LG Health, plus the total, showing 13 weeks before their mandate (February 2021) and 13 weeks after the mandate (today).

Overall, the organization had 423 positions listed in June. And now they have 785.

That’s 85% more openings.

Employees are stampeding to get out of this place.

By percentage:

Will it be a nurse or an “open position” you need when your father hits the call button on 8 West?

Will it be a tech or an “open position” you need to start CPR when your brother codes in the ED?

Will it be a physician or an “open position” you need to read your daughter’s chest X-ray?

Do Linked In ads answer phones? Do sign-on bonuses deliver meals? Will that classified listing clean the floor, change the sheets, fix the elevator, or fill your prescription?

Almost 30,000 Lancastrians read my last post, and almost 7,000 interacted with it on Facebook. I got so many, many kind words, but… it was also made *somewhat* clear you’re not all fans of what you think I’m saying.

So let me say it again, louder for the people in the back:

“I am not arguing for or against any medical procedure. I am not “refusing” anything, nor am I keeping anyone else from having something they want or need. But whether or not I agree, or you agree, that healthcare workers should have bodily autonomy isn’t the issue. The bottom line is that there are hundreds of LGH employees who have already left over this mandate, and hundreds more are due up to be fired in three weeks. And THAT matters to all the corporeal beings of Lancaster County. ”

If you live in Lancaster, you need to be scared. You need to shame these foolish leaders who are choosing politics over patient care.

The job postings sting as pathetic; they’re begging so hard to get people to work in this place. And yet, there are ever-growing hundreds of qualified, trained, experienced professionals who want to continue serving patients, but they’re being fired, pressured, coerced, bullied, manipulated, and laughed out the door.

Lancaster, let your healthcare heroes keep working the jobs they love.

This is a life-sapping ‘your kind of help not wanted’ catastrophe.

Your hospital is hemorrhaging employees, and it’s getting worse.

To the Board of Trustees: your employees are people, not pawns. Stop the bleeding!

Lancaster’s dedicated veterans who have had their exemption requests refused with the most offensive of language are still sticking it out. You have a chance to help them. These people aren’t organizing walk-outs. They aren’t leaving when your mom’s colostomy bag ruptures. They are still holding your sister’s hand when she hears the cancer diagnosis. They are answering their pager at 3:14 am.

You see, unlike the ivory-tower leadership who hides behind Zoom screens and smartphones, the women and men on the front lines have dry hands, tired backs, mask rashes, and headaches from their safety goggles.

These healthcare heroes love their patients, and they’re going to be there—taking blood pressures, transporting patients, making meals, and changing lightbulbs—until security escorts them out in three weeks. That’s when we’ll see if LGH’s leadership’s choice is really to have empty hallways and unattended call-bells… if they’re really willing to destroy the generations-long legacy of this hospital.

If your neighbors don’t speak up and get LGH’s embarrassingly silent leaders to refuse this Penn Medicine policy, it’s you and your family that are going to suffer. When you need a thriving hospital, you will instead pull up to a half-empty, half-hearted shell of what LGH once was.

Lancaster, let Penn Medicine know that our community deserves better.

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If you want to donate to the legal defense fund for the healthcare heroes who are standing up to this mandate, you can do that here.

P.S. Someone *realskies* politely told me the bonuses I mentioned last time were not real, so here are some handy-dandy links so you can check yourself:

All sign on bonuses (53 at publish date)

$10,000 sign on bonus (1 at publish date)

$5,000 sign on bonus (18 at publish date)

$4,000 sign on bonus (7 at publish date)

LG Leaders Contact Info

Alex Jorgensen, Chief of Human Resources
alexandra.jorgensen@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-1210

John Lines, PR Director
john.lines@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5054

Mike Ripchinski, Chief Clinical Officer
michael.ripchinski@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5817

Stacey Youcis, Chief of Hospital Operations
stacey.youcis@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5007

here's why it matters to you that people like my husband are getting fired from l.g.h. on september 1

Here’s why Penn Medicine’s mandate matters to you.

I’m going to paint you a picture. Let’s say your local hospital decides to fire everyone in one month if they had a letter X in their name. I know what we’re facing is more serious than this, but hang with me.

Not a lot of people have X in their name. Sure, there’s Alex the ER nurse, but, honestly, he was always kind of weird, right? Let him go. One person out of thousands is no big deal.

But the problem is, you forgot about the gastroenterologist Max and Felix the pharmacist. You feel kind of bad, but again, it’s a big place and there are always good people looking for jobs.

Unfortunately, Sarah the surgeon is married to Alex, and Jack from Facilities Management is Felix’s brother. So even though they don’t have the X, they’re leaving too. They’re shocked that the organization they dedicated their lives to serving suddenly views them as expendable.

Good thing we’re only down five people in a hospital of thousands.

We’re fine.

But wait, you forgot about Daxton from HR and Roxanne, the administrative manager for pediatrics. Suddenly, it’s seeming like more people. And then, you find out that when the cardiologist Xiao got his pink slip, his whole department quit in protest. All of a sudden, it isn’t just 8 or 9 people.

It’s dozens.

Then it’s hundreds.

…what if it’s a thousand?

Lancaster General Hospital’s last publicly announced numbers said up to 30% of their staff was saying NO to this mandate.

Your hospital is about to get flooded by temporary, transient employees. When does the patient care level of the hospital get affected? Do you want to show up at an ER and get treated by 30% of staff who were in Poughkeepsie last month and will disappear to Scranton by October?

Do you?

This is why it should matter to you. It shouldn’t matter because you do or do not think the people fighting are stupid or crazy or irrelevant. It should matter to you because this matters enough to them that they’re going to lose their jobs over this. And when they do—you’re stuck sending your injured child to a hospital where 30% of the staff doesn’t know where the bathroom is.

Gosh, I hope the temp staff they’re hiring can find the AED when they need it.

Employee morale is currently so bad they’re offering massive sign-on bonuses and unheard-of shift differentials just to get bodies to take shifts. They’ve moved to a rolling hiring process for positions they’ve never had trouble filling. And the nation was already in a nursing shortage.

Gosh, I hope the wildly overworked veterans who stay can keep their exhausted eyes open when they start your mom’s IV.

It needs to matter to you that your local hospital leadership is making a decision that is going to negatively impact patient care by leading to massive employee turnover at a time when all we need is our healthcare heroes. Let your hard-working neighbors keep their jobs!

Tell Penn Medicine this mandate is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.

And tell Lancaster Newspapers and WGAL to do their only job and report objectively.

If you’re a human person with a physical body and you live in Lancaster, this matters to you.

And if you don’t live in Lancaster, they are coming to divide and destroy your hometown hospital next.