Greetings,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My name is Andrew, and I recently (mid-2019) underwent a kidney transplant at Swedish Medical Center\u2019s Seattle hospital, with the aid and coordination of their Organ Transplant Center. My recovery has progressed steadily and by the numbers. My experience with Swedish was the best I could possibly imagine under the circumstances, and I owe my life\u2014literally<\/em> owe my life\u2014to the skilled and dedicated staff. From the folks who run the desks and phones, the patient coordinators, the lab technicians, up to the on-staff nephrologists Drs. Vadivel and Reddy, and the surgeon (shout out to Dr. Precht and his team) who performed the procedure. And of course and especially, the countless nurses, caregivers and other medical support staff who are the indispensable front-line infantry of any medical center. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As with everyone on Swedish\u2019s medical staff, they deserve my eternal gratitude; mine and countless others. They also deserve a living wage and decent working conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We seem to be on a terrible downhill slide in our healthcare\nsystem\u2026.in truth, in so many aspects of our modern day-to-day existence. We\nhave chosen to allow our most crucial public services to be commodified,\nletting the Invisible Hand of the marketplace determine the quality and\ncapacity of these institutions. Suppressing the workforce in the name of\nefficiency and rock-bottom prices isn\u2019t even a good idea if you\u2019re selling\nMcNuggets. Applying such practices to a system intended to keep body and soul\ntogether in times of crisis is a recipe for disaster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n People should be aware that so much of what the union is asking for\ncomes down to patient safety. Chronic understaffing of hospitals should not be\nSOP. Permanent \u201cCrunch Time\u201d is not even acceptable in the video game industry.\nWhy should it be boilerplate practice for a Critical Care nurse? How does that\nmake any sense? <\/p>\n\n\n\n The employees of Swedish Seattle aren\u2019t asking for much; in fact,\nProvidence Health Systems (the entity that owns Swedish as well as their own\neponymous facilities) offers their Portland employees a package that\nessentially mirrors what our Seattle workers are asking for. This is not a\nfinancial issue for Providence. This not-for-profit group earns approximately\n$700 million annually. They pay their top 16 executives approximately $40\nmillion a year. They have cash reserves of around $11 billion-with-a-b dollars,\nsome of which they are undoubtedly dipping into to import and pay non-union\nstaff during the strike, along with bonuses, housing allowances and travel\ncosts. Or perhaps it\u2019s being covered by their strike insurance, if such a thing\nexists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would be very worried if I were slated for a procedure during the\nstrike period. Not that out-of-town workers are necessarily not highly\nqualified, but they are unfamiliar with the facilities and culture in which\nthey now find themselves operating. That would give me pause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sole purpose of Providence\u2019s refusal to bargain in good faith\nseems fairly obvious under the circumstances: they would like to break this\nunion. In the eyes of senior management, the most sensible strategy is to spend\nhundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to pull the SEIU\u2019s teeth, so\nthat next contract they can more efficiently push their employees a little\nfurther\u2014or a lot further\u2014down that slide I mentioned earlier, on the dizzying\nrace to the bottom. Where, in their market-driven Utopia, nurses are as\ninterchangeable as Subway Sandwich Artists and health care is doled out at the\nexact rate and level of quality that keeps money spent on lawsuits lower than\nannual revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would hate to think where I would be had we already reached that\npoint. Probably in an urn on my wife\u2019s bedside table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks for reading,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Andrew<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Greetings, My name is Andrew, and I recently (mid-2019) underwent a kidney transplant at Swedish Medical Center\u2019s Seattle hospital, with the aid and coordination of their Organ Transplant Center. My recovery has progressed steadily and by the numbers. My experience with Swedish was the best I could possibly imagine under the circumstances, and I owe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-me-mails"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5399"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5407,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5399\/revisions\/5407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}