April 7

I promised y'all a followup post to the spicy email saga, so here we are. And yet the fall out was much, much different than I expected. 

Let me preface this by saying that I generally frown upon all forms administration, in that the C Suite people are so far removed from patient care that they've forgotten the one thing a hospital is actually supposed to do. There are still great administrators out there, it's the fallacy of the entire system that is bad. Our ER director is one of those great administrators, stuck in that broken system.

When I had my post-email meeting with her, there was an explosion of frustrations from me. I genuinely let loose, to be honest. I sort of apologized for the unprofessional tone of the email, but not what it contained. I also told her that I stood behind everything said, and would read it again to the president of the hospital if given the chance. There were also lots of good points made by her, and a lot of the frustrations I had were things she is aware of and actively working to fix, as much as is possible. There's a lot of transparency issues with major hospitals, and ours is no different - she promised to make our staff more aware of what they're working from the top, and I very much appreciated that. Staffing is our other big problem, in that we're constantly working short. I told her this was unacceptable, and that there is no other way around it and that the department will lose the rest of their employees if they don't address it. Within a week, we had a slightly better staffing grid.

So there were lots of positive outcomes from this. The one I was least expecting, though, was to be offered the position of full-time charge. In their words, "we appreciate your spiciness and willingness to say the difficult things while still being open to learn why things are the way they are." So there's that.