This community opinion was contributed by San Benito County resident, George Fendler. The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent BenitoLink or other affiliated contributors. Lea este artículo en español aquí. 

Hypocrisy! Is that what we are dealing with? It’s not always intentional. But, our personal biases do influence our actions—sometimes without our awareness.

At the June 26 Healthcare District Board meeting there was an item of interest. The board was trying to decide whether to approve a three-year contract to hire a doctor with a base payment of $795,000 annually. That may or not be an appropriate contract for our financially distressed hospital. My point is the way it was handled.

In the meeting they first read several glowing recommendation letters saying what a great doctor he is. There was very little discussion about whether or not there was a documented need for his specialty and to what degree his services would contribute to the profitability of the hospital.

When the question of a case pending with the California Medical Board was raised, President Johnson, supported by counsel, ruled that that information cannot be discussed because it is a personnel matter.

My question is, if possible negative aspects of this doctor are personnel matters, shouldn’t positive aspects as presented in letters of recommendation be considered personnel matters as well? The agenda item being decided was “Consider and Approve Professional Services Agreement for xxxxxxxxxxxx M.D., for a three-year term with an estimated amount of $795,000 annually. It would seem that discussion items relevant to this item would be:

  • Is the specialty skill needed?
  • Would it be profitable?
  • If not profitable, would residents have viable alternatives if the doctor was not hired?
  • Will this help improve our hospital’s desirability to the community?
  • The compensation is for a minimum of 16 shifts per month. What will the compensation be for additional shifts? Is that at the same rate (around $500/hour) or will it be time-and-a-half (around $700/hr) or something else? The actual contract details were not discussed with the board.

I would think that the above questions should have been discussed. There was very little of this information brought up. So much for making an informed decision. My view is that this doctor may be a fine man and be an asset to the community. However it’s odd that, since the Director of the Medical Staff recommended that the contract be approved, that any discussion of qualifications was thought to be appropriate in this open-session board meeting. Personnel matters are supposed to be discussed in closed-sessions.

I can’t help wondering if this “consider and approve” mentality of signing long-term contracts isn’t one of the things that has hampered the profitability of our hospital.

Then, on to item 6D of the agenda: “Consider Residency Qualifications for District Zone 5…”

If you haven’t been following the Measure X fiasco, I will recap.

Measure X was proposed by the board to get permission to sell all of the county’s healthcare assets to Insight Healthcare. The measure passed, but just barely. I believe that it got as much voter support as it did because it was worded in a very misleading way.

One of the obstacles to getting rid of our hospital was Dr. Gabriel who was about to take a seat on the board representing Zone 5. He was opposed to the board offloading their responsibility to provide medical services to the community by selling everything to someone else. Maybe someone else will be able to do what the current management is unable to do while extracting their profit from the same revenue stream that the current management seems to be struggling with.

Here is the situation as I understand it.

  • The board wants to get rid of the hospital.
  • Dr. Gabriel is a board member who doesn’t agree with that position.
  • The CEO comes up with a plan.
  • Find a way to fire Dr. Gabriel from the hospital. With no work for him in the county, he will have to commute to some other hospital.
  • If he moves out of the district, he will no longer have residency in Zone 5 and thus be ineligible to be a director.
  • The plan seemed to be working. She fired him because he had a dispute with the parking attendant at the County Fair and because he got angry when he showed up to perform a surgery and found that the hospital had disposed of the medical tools that were needed to perform the surgery.
  • She sent him a letter to his physical postal address and it was returned. That gave her justification to pursue a $15,000 investigation into his actual residency.

People living in rural areas often use a P.O. Box for their postal correspondence. Rural mailboxes aren’t particularly secure. If the mailbox isn’t visited it fills with junk mail or gets knocked over. Eventually, the post office returns the first class mail to the sender. I don’t know if that’s what happened in this case. But, our financially strapped hospital is willing to spend $15,000 to get to the bottom of this homemade scandal.

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