RE: Steemit's First Professional Hockey Player!
I was the Director of IT at the Hospice of Saint John. I left there about a year before they ended up closing their doors. I'd seen the writing on the wall due to some severe upper management issues and fraud stuff. I also could not complete my duties to my satisfaction. I did get it more organized and stable than it'd ever really been. It still was held together by duct tape and bailing wire in the IT sense of things.
That was almost 4 years ago. A year or so after I left the news started coming out on 9 News and other places about that place. The CEO basically ran that place into the ground.
That is him in that video and he is trying to cover there. I know a lot of stupid and questionable spendings that guy did.
It is sad that place failed though as most of the people there really cared about their job and helping people.
Holy smokes, your story there looks like a great post in itself! Good thing you got out of there, that's crazy! My fiance is a nurse and worked at a facility I will not name, but she left because the ongoings were of similar incidents you describe and even worse! I have learned that the health care industry can be a scary place!
Yeah the sad thing is there were some really great people there. Just as with most organizations those that want power tend to float to the top, and those that want power are usually the people that should have it least.
People (including me) really cared about the fact we were helping people. He had this little cabin office (fanciest place there) that they hired 3 ladies making more than anyone in the IT department (me and one tech I trained) and CEOs wife was also paid a good wage from there and she was rarely even there. The CEO was getting over $100K/year and had himself listed as a contractor... not an employee of the hospice. He also used to be the president of the Board of Directors who answers to the Order of Saint John of whom the CEO was a high ranking member. So there had been attempts by staff to remove the CEO before I got there. It resulted in quite a few people losing their job. He would go out to lunch at nice places pretty much daily and would ask the CFO or COO to go to lunch with him (or both) and would bill it to the hospice as a company expense. They are non-profit, I couldn't get the equipment I needed, stuff would fail that I'd warn them about a year in advance, and that CEO just kept doing his thing. He had diabetes and if you know anything about it, if you don't treat it properly it can cause major mood swings. He didn't treat it well at all. I saw him turn purple in rage a couple of times. He should not have been in that position, and because there was the conflict of interest due to the amount of power he wielded in the order that the board of directors reported to he had become virtually untouchable. Had he not been in charge WE could have made that place work even with the changes to medicare/medicaid that he tried to blame it on.
I didn't know it was going to close when I left, but it did not surprise me. I left mainly because when stuff I warned them about did break down I'd scramble to fix it and if it wasn't fast enough he'd be angry. So I figure he'd throw a fit and fire me at some point. He always threatened to fire all the vendors and such regularly. That was his go to solution. Fire them. If one office change it didn't matter if we were doing critical maintenance or not he'd ask us to drop what we were doing, print him a new extension label for his phone and come install it. That place was his own personal candy store. He liked the title and position, but he truly only cared about that place when he stopped to take the time to think about caring for that place, which only seemed to be when someone put him on the spot about caring for that place. I've worked at two crazy places... perhaps I should do a post at some point. The one with the guy in a hazmat suit vaccuming next to my desk while I'm sitting there in normal clothes was interesting. I quit that place. A few years later it had a 60 minute special done on it and was shut down... yeah I may blog that. That one is my go to story when people complain about their job. :)