An anesthesiology group plays hardball with the hospital. The hospital then fires the whole group:
All 20 anesthesiologists who work at Northwest Hospital & Medical Center said they were simply looking for fairness and respect when they recently went to management and asked for more than $2 million.They said they just wanted the CEO to make up for telling them they were doing a lousy job.
Instead, late last week the North Seattle hospital responded by canceling their contract “” essentially firing them all.
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{ 13 comments }
mess with the bull, you get the horns. which side leaked to the press? i wonder if the physicians fired the consultant?
Anesthesia makes over 400,000 per year?
I got two words for the “fired” anesthesiologists: boo hoo
The public has no sympathy neither.
Signed: underpaid, overworked, underappreciated family practitioner from upstate New York
Divide and Conquer anonymous 9:47. You are playing into the puppet master’s hands. Divide and Conquer… You should be ashamed.
Sorry to tell you depression-land FP but that is half what they should command. Sleep well.
“Signed: underpaid, overworked, underappreciated family practitioner from upstate New York”
You sound like a very miserable, glass half-full person. Don’t you understand that the best thing that can happen for those who want to destroy the medical profession is for those in medicine to become destroyed by jealousy.
I use to do do primary care as well. Yeah it sucked. I quit and did something else. Being jealous of what others had was not any help.
So let me see if I get this. The hospital and the doctors group entered into a mutually beneficial agreement. The group provides anesth coverage for the hospital’s patients. The hospital agrees to give exclusive rights to the doctors. The hospital admins decide that the doctors had not been performing well and sought to renegotiate or look for different doctors. They were unable at first to come to a mutually acceptable deal, so the hospital decided not to work with this group of doctors under the old terms. Isn’t the solution for both sides either to re-negotiate successfully or for the hospital to find new doctors and the doctors to find new jobs? This seems like a case of two sides who used to do business together no longer choosing to do business together. Happens all the time in the world. It doesn’t seem to me as if either side did anything evil nor even wrong.
As a general surgeon in the Midwest, I make less than half that and I am on call every other day. I’d say the anesthesiologists got what they deserved.
Agreed:
The hospital admin is saying the didn’t have the two mil to spend. If they did it would come out of somewhere. RN’s salary’s, further slashing already woefully minimal help provided to PCP’s, etc. The anesthiologist group should have been prepared with all possible scenario’s including termination of the contract. You don’t play hardball without the understanding what happens if you get hit by the ball.
Anon 12:30: Though I agree underpaid could have stated things differently, you have to understand the frustrations of a PCP (I am not) who is working their tail off 100-120 K including horrendous (by anesth standards) call and see’s MD groups arguing about not getting an average of 400K per year. Part of the problem in medicine is that we specialists are not standing up for the PCP’s. We are just as guilty of NIMBY ideology to cuts. A 10% medicare cut will hurt specialists. It will kill primary care.
“As a general surgeon in the Midwest, I make less than half that and I am on call every other day. I’d say the anesthesiologists got what they deserved.”
And I would say that unless you are independently wealthy, single, and abhor sleep, there are much better situations elsewhere, even in family practice. I cannot imagine remaining in such a situation. Is this really the whole story?
Kevin, you’re about ten years too late to this kind of party.
Welcome to the free market, physicians.
Re: “welcome to the free market”: If you are a hospital-based physician you are already well acquainted with the “free market” of non-resource patients who roll in through the ER. The hospital ultimately is reimbursed by the federal government for such uncollectable debt, physicians are not. It would appear to me the successor group is either desperate or naive.
Any of you family physicians ever been “fired” by a hospital? Ever have an “exclusive” for admitting to a hospital?. Of course not. I would NEVER consider a hospital-based specialty. You are nothing more than a warm body. And let us not forget all those uncompensated committee positions you hold for hospital benefit. Not me.
Big deal, they cancelled the contract. As if neither party was aware that the contract they were working under could be cancelled on notice by the other party. This is typical hardball business negotiations tactics. Maybe the administrator has another group with a contracts proposal, and maybe this is a Mexican standoff. The docs got to work and the hospital has to have board-certified anaesthesiologists aboard to stay open (can’t run an OR, a labor deck or an ICU without them.)
Goung public about the “unfair” firing is just hardball in return.
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