It turned out that Dr. Wright and Providence Hospital Staff were not the only ones experiencing this problem. Of the five or six hospitals adopting Friesen’s concept, only one or two could make it function successfully according to design.
Later, in October 1972, Mr. Gilreath explained that he and Dr. Wright had talked in great length about the best course of action regarding Dr. Wright’s position. He clearly did not have either the appropriate education or experience to handle the SPD Department which, due to the centralization system, branched out into nearly all areas of the hospital. He and Mr. Gilreath came to a mutual decision: Dr. Wright would step down from being assistant administrator, and instead, he would simply be the Director of the Pharmacy Department.
“The memo appointing you as assistant administrator over the SPD department will go out tomorrow,” Mr. Gilreath informed me.
I was happy to hear this, although at the same time, I was sad for Dr. Wright. Mr. Gilreath explained that this was best for the hospital and the patients.
The next day, many people congratulated me on my promotion. It was one of the happiest days of my life. I would have a tremendous amount of responsibility and authority, something I thrived on. I loved the challenge and eagerly anticipated the high level of respect I would have in such an important position. I had steadily worked my way up from the bottom rung of society, picking up trash in the McDonald’s parking lot, and here I was, only one step away from being the head of a hospital. This was a pivotal moment in my life, one that I would treasure for a long time.
That same day, Bob called. When he heard about my promotion, he invited me to come to the Press Club to celebrate. Feeling high on excitement, I agreed and called Raj to give her the news about my promotion. “I’m going to be home a little late since I’m going to stop and have a beer with Bob,” I added.
Once at the bar, things got out of hand. People were buying me drinks left and right. I felt that after so much hard work, I deserved to relax and let go. When I finally returned to the apartment late that evening, I stumbled through the door, laughing and singing drunkenly.
Raj glared at me.
“You’re gone all day, leaving me to take care of Subhash all by myself, and then you come home like this?” she snapped.
I stopped in my tracks. Raj had never raised her voice before. In the next moment, Raj broke into tears.
“I’m so sorry, Raj,” I said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
She continued to cry and wouldn’t look at me.
“We were celebrating,” I explained. “Things got a little crazy.”
I kept apologizing, but it didn’t matter what I said. For the rest of the evening, we sat quietly at opposite ends of the room. I had anticipated celebrating my promotion with Raj, but I did not realize my actions would make her so angry.
Chapter 16
As assistant administrator over the SPD department, it became my responsibility to make sure that SPD provided efficient services to the patient floors and other departments. SPD, located on the basement level, had a bad reputation in this regard. All the upper departments referred to it as “Stupid People Downstairs.” Since I was in charge of SPD, I did not like this term. Although there was not much I could do about it, I was determined to change its image by making as many improvements to SPD as I could. Once we started giving timely, more efficient service, the image would correct itself.
First and foremost, I tackled “Mount Hopeless,” the giant mound of soiled laundry that perpetually sat in the reprocessing section. There was so much backlog that the reprocessing employees could not keep up with it, and one employee, a slightly mentally challenged person but still a good worker, put a sign near it on which he had written, with creative spelling, “Mount Hopless.”
Due to the enormous backlog, the nurses constantly yelled at the Laundry Department because they continually ran out of clean linens. Having experience in this area from my laundry project at St. Elizabeth Hospital, I began observing the reprocessing section’s methods right away. Currently, they utilized a specific formula for all the various types of linens that came through the reprocessing section, the area that contained the laundry washer and extractor. This formula had been set to a sixty-minute cycle required for heavily soiled linens. After studying how many pounds of laundry were to be reprocessed on a daily basis, I realized there would always be a backlog, and the employee who ran the machines during an eight-hour shift Monday through Friday would never catch up.
I set a goal to shorten the laundry washing time and still provide clean linens to the patient floor. Working with a sales rep from the American Laundry Company (who designed the formulas for the machines), we were able to incorporate three different formulas by classifying the linens into three groups: surgical linens, heavily soiled linens, and moderately soiled linens. I noted that not all of the linens were heavily soiled. By washing these separately, we could reduce the washing time for each load, meaning we could redistribute these linens to the patient floors more quickly. By implementing these formulas, we would be able to wash all the soiled laundry on a daily basis in an eight-hour shift Monday thru Friday.
However, there was still the matter of “Mount Hopeless.” Mr. Gilreath approved my request for employees to work overtime to wash the entire backlog of laundry. Once people saw the results of my changes, the nurses and reprocessing employees began to have confidence in me.
Yet there was one more issue in the reprocessing section that bothered me. In the entire time Providence Hospital was open, the laundry bags holding all the soiled laundry had never been washed. They looked dirty and bloody, and whenever I went into that area, the room would have a strange, musty odor. There were around seventy to eighty bags, and I calculated that if we washed ten to fifteen bags a week over a five-week period, all the bags would be clean. The reprocessing supervisor agreed with me, but some of the employees didn’t.
One day while I was making my rounds, one employee said, “Mr. Bedi, why do we wash these laundry bags? They are only going to get dirty again.”
“Gee, you have a point,” I said. “But now let me ask you a question. I hope you wear underwear. And probably, you are changing it every day and washing it. Why wash it if it’s going to get dirty again?”
The employee just looked at me and said, “Mr. Bedi, you have a point.”
Later, when I told this story to Mr. Gilreath, he could not stop laughing.
“Kris, what a question!” he laughed, tears in his eyes as he tried to control himself. “Very good example. Very good!”
One Saturday while out shopping with Raj and Subhash, I decided to stop by Providence Hospital to see what was happening in my departments. As I entered the reprocessing area, I was stunned to see four college students playing baseball with a broomstick, while the soiled laundry, dirty dishes, and contaminated instruments were piling up in each section.
Another weekend, I found them sitting on the floor playing a game of cards. The supervisor had trouble being strict with them. She felt like a mother figure, and she often said, “These are my kids.”
I could only shake my head. “That is not how your relationship should be,” I explained. “You are their supervisor, and you need to make sure they do their work.”
One day, an employee came to my office to tell me he could not work Monday nights because it was football night on television. I couldn’t believe my ears. At the same time, I realized that he was a college student, and since I had been a college student once, I tried to be helpful, talking to him as an equal. Yet, when it came down to it, I told him, “While you are at work, do a good job. This job is providing you the means to carry on your college studies and to achieve your dreams. The football game is not going to do it.” He left my office, not happy, but realizing it made sense.
It was a challenge to get these college students to improve their work ethic at Providence Hospital. One day, Mr. Gilreath invited a consultant to help design the office space layout, and while giving him a
tour, Mr. Gilreath brought the consultant to the SPD Department. He pointed out the bare concrete floors in the reprocessing area and explained that he wanted to create a more aesthetic feel to the area by installing a covering that would give the floor more traction, since it often got wet. All of a sudden, someone threw a glass toward them while their backs were turned. The glass crashed against the wall. It was an act of rebellion, as the employees were unhappy with some of the changes Mr. Gilreath was implementing.
Alarmed, Mr. Gilreath demanded to know who threw the glass. No employee came forward because they all were protecting each other. After the tour, the consultant expressed amazement at how the employees behaved and how chaotic the department functions were. Needless to say, once it was determined who threw the glass, that employee was fired.
After I had been assistant administrator for four or five months and had made significant improvements in reprocessing, Mr. Gilreath asked the consultant to take another look at the floor. This time he encountered no incident with the reprocessing employees, and after the tour, the consultant commented to Mr. Gilreath, “I don’t know what Kris has done, but today those chimpanzees behaved like adults.”
I felt strongly about creating a good image in the reprocessing area of the SPD department. As assistant administrator, it especially reflected on me. I kept telling the employees, “Just because you are working with soiled items, it doesn’t mean it should look dirty or smell soiled, and it doesn’t mean that your job is not important.” Over time, the employees began to cooperate, as they realized I was genuinely interested in them.
At the same time, while making my rounds, I observed that the reprocessing employees were washing the vacuum containers, referred to as “vacutainers,” that the pathology lab used to draw blood specimens. I was sure that vacutainers could not be used again, since they did not have their tabs anymore and were only a single-use item. Yet it took the employees hours to wash the vacutainers by hand so they could send them back to the pathology lab.
One day, I asked an employee, “Hey, why are you washing these?”
“This is what we have always done ever since the hospital opened,” the employee replied.
The reprocessing supervisor said the same thing.
At the end of the day, I mentioned this incident to Mr. Gilreath. He just laughed. “Kris, let me handle that,” he said.
Immediately, he went to the pathology lab and spoke to the lab manager in charge of operations. “What do you do with these vacutainers when they are sent back to you?” Mr. Gilreath asked.
“Oh, we just throw them away,” she said.
Mr. Gilreath could not believe it. The reprocessing employees were spending so much time washing these containers, and the lab employees had never taken the time to inform the reprocessing supervisor that they only threw them away.
“What a discovery you are making every day!” Mr. Gilreath told me.
In 1973, Raj and I bought a house in Anderson Township southeast of Cincinnati, an area with a good school district, since Sub-hash would be starting preschool soon. Located on Sunderland Avenue, it was a four-bedroom, ranch style home on a peaceful cul-de-sac.
One day in early June 1973, Raj woke up with a sinus headache and a stuffy nose. After feeding Subhash, she decided to go out on the deck to see if the sunshine would make her feel better. As usual, she closed the sliding door behind her so Subhash would stay inside. After a few seconds, Subhash came to the door and pushed the latch down. Hearing the click, Raj turned around and saw Subhash grinning at her, his face pushed up against the glass.
“No, Subhash!” Raj called out, rushing to the door and kneeling down to Subhash’s level. “Unlock the door, Subhash. Please! Push the latch back!”
He did not understand her, and with her fingers, Raj mimed touching the latch and pushing it up. Subhash only smiled, thinking, Mommy is playing with me. Raj made another attempt to communicate with him, but Subhash only laughed and rapped his hands on the glass.
Determined to find a way to get inside, Raj went to the deck railing, hoisted herself over, and jumped fourteen feet to the ground. Barefoot and in her pajamas, she walked to our next door neighbor’s house and rang the bell. Belinda came to the door and looked at Raj in surprise.
“I’m sorry for being in my pajamas,” Raj began, “but I am locked out of my house, and my one-and-a-half-year-old son is inside.”
“Oh, dear. Come in, come in,” Belinda said. “I will call the locksmith and see if they can send someone over right away.”
She made several phone calls, but the locksmiths said the soonest they could come was the next day, and the last one said he could be there in the afternoon.
“That is too late,” Raj said, nearly in tears. “I need inside right away.”
“You could break the small ventilation window in the basement,” one of the locksmiths suggested. “That would be the quickest way to get in, and it’s not expensive to repair.”
Raj nodded. “Let’s do that.”
Belinda called her son downstairs, and they all went to the side of our house. Her son picked up a big rock and used it to break all the glass from the window. Carefully, he climbed through the window and unlocked the front door. As soon as Raj entered the house, Subhash ran to Raj to give her a hug. He was happy to have his mother back, but there were no words to express how joyful Raj felt to be back inside with her son.
When I came home from work that evening, Raj told me, “We need to get the basement window repaired.”
“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”
She told me everything that had happened, and I stared at her in alarm.
“Raj, all that you went through!” I exclaimed. “Why didn’t you just call me?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt you at work. You could have been in a meeting. And it is forty-five minutes to get here. I didn’t want you to drive all this way, and then drive back.”
The next day when I told Mr. Gilreath about Raj’s morning, he said, “Boy, Raj is very brave to jump off the deck like that, and she sure is considerate of you, Kris.”
As time passed, my foremost goal was to change the SPD Department’s image from “Stupid People Downstairs” to “Super People Downstairs.” This department was the most difficult to improve. With eighty-five employees at the bottom of the totem pole, most of them lacked motivation to do well in their work. They did not consider their jobs important, and they knew they were looked down on by the employees on the upper floors.
One day at the weekly staff meeting, I looked at the employees, some of them slumped in their chairs, arms crossed, most of them looking bored. I knew I had to do something drastic to get their attention. “Just so you know,” I said, “all this equipment you guys are working with—the washers, the sterilizers, the distribution system—is all fixed. It’s not going to move anywhere. Only people are replaceable.”
The employees were taken aback by my boldness. Right away, my comment caught fire, and in the following weeks, people began saying that I was not sensitive to the employees. Mr. Gilreath also heard of my comment. “Kris, that was quite blunt,” he said. “Perhaps you should have stated it differently, even though it is a fact.”
After that, I became more sensitive to the way I stated things and tried to choose my words more carefully. However, the perception that I was not sensitive to employees simply was not true. I made a point to learn everyone’s name, and when I spoke to people, calling them by their first name, they would look at me in amazement because I could remember eighty-five people. As I made rounds, I spoke to the employees about their personal situations. If someone was in the middle of a divorce or became engaged or had a new grandchild, I would listen and ask questions, showing concern or interest about their lives outside of work. If someone went on vacation, I would ask where they were going, and once they returned, I made sure to ask them how they enjoyed their trip. If a family member was sick, I made certain that I followed up with the employee to see how that p
erson was doing. I tried to be nice to the employees and show that I genuinely cared for them, but at the same time, I expected them to work hard and to know their purpose at Providence Hospital was to provide good service.
As time went on, one other problem weighed on my shoulders. The surgical instruments were still not being redistributed in a timely manner. It was a life or death matter if a surgeon did not have the appropriate instrument to continue a procedure. I began developing a case cart system (CCS) for the preparation and sterilization section which involved getting a list of instruments, supplies, and stainless steel bowls and trays needed for each individual case. Then, the case cart with the requested items would be prepared from the processed stores section and sent to the designated area of the operating room, so the carts would already be there for the next day’s case. The Surgery Department used thousands of different instruments, and it soon became clear that I would need help if I were to make any valuable contribution to this area.
Mr. Gilreath suggested that his wife, an operating room nurse, could help me with the project. With Mrs. Gilreath’s assistance, I could better understand the terminology and issues relating to each surgery.
In the SPD department, I began holding monthly meetings with the eighty-five employees. Sometimes Mr. Gilreath joined us, and once, he announced, “Hey, as staff members, you need to work with Kris so we can make all these improvements. Once we implement them, and once you guys start showing improvement, I will treat you all to an evening at the Beverly Hills Club.”
A buzz went around the room at the prospect of being treated to a night out. An outspoken black woman raised her hand.
Engineering a Life Page 20