The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
A recent altercation between two doctors at the Flin Flon General Hospital is not indicative of workplace toxicity across the hospital or the local health care system. That's the assessment of Helga Bryant, CEO of the Northern Health Region. 'It's two people having an issue between them,' she says. 'That doesn't necessarily reflect on the whole system.' To support her evaluation, Bryant refers to a range of data that points to a healthy working environment for NHR employees in Flin Flon. For one, she says there is not a single outstanding complaint from an employee relating to the workplace culture. There are six open grievances, Bryant says, but all of them relate to procedural issues vis-?-vis the collective bargaining agreement. More significant, in her view, are the NHR's low vacancy rate and declining number of sick days and overtime hours, the latter being necessary when sick days rise. 'If you don't enjoy coming to work, you're going to call in sick,' Bryant says. 'You're going to complain a lot. There's going to be high vacancy rates because people are fleeing the workplace and it's difficult to attract new (employees).' See 'Just' on pg. Continued from pg. The Flin Flon General Hospital currently has three vacancies, one of which, a nursing position, is part-time. The hospital also lacks one pharmacist and one occupational therapist. 'That is a very, very low vacancy rate,' Bryant says, comparing it to industry standards. Across Flin Flon as as a whole, the NHR has 12 unfilled positions, a 'very acceptable vacancy rate,' in her view. 'You want to have a vacancy rate around three per cent because you want to have vacant positions for people who relocate to the community,' Bryant says. 'You don't want people to come to the community for one spouse to work and then the other spouse not be able to find work.' In terms of sick days, she says there has been a 9.1 per cent decrease in Flin Flon compared to 2011-12 and an 8.8 per cent decline in overtime hours. Beyond that, Bryant makes note of a number of NHR employees who continue to work even though they can retire with a full pension. 'Typically when you have a toxic or unhealthy work environment, people retire the day they reach their retirement (age),' she says. Taken Seriously When workplace complaints do arise within the NHR, Bryant says they are taken 'very seriously.' 'Everything that comes to my attention is dealt with,' she says, adding that the NHR has 'much further developed' processes for dealing with complaints than the former NOR-MAN Regional Health Authority had. Bryant says the NHR also has 'strong medical leadership' in the form a vice-president of medical services and chief medical officer, a position that did not exist in NOR-MAN. In that position, Thompson's Dr. Hussam Azzam oversees physicians working in the region, providing guidance and ensuring proper medical standards are followed. Bryant says those duties would have formerly rested with the CEO, but highly educated professionals like doctors are best led by another person in their own profession. For his part Bill Hanson, a Flin Flon-based carpenter for the NHR, says he doesn't see toxicity when he goes to work. 'I've been working there 14 years now and at no time...did I ever think that our work environment was toxic,' he says. 'Now, I work in every department in that hospital and I go...virtually from the top to the bottom, over to the Personal Care Home down to the (Northern Lights) Manor. And...there's a lot of really good people that work there.' Hanson felt that comments included in a recent Reminder article on the physician altercation, suggesting that the episode was symptomatic of broader workplace challenges, were undue. 'For people, especially people that don't work there, and they're getting their information third and fourth hand, to say it's a toxic work environment, that just wasn't fair,' he says. 'I mean, two individuals got into an argument and the whole place seemed to be painted with that same tar brush. And I just didn't think that was right because, you know, I love my job and a lot of the people that I work with, I know they really love their jobs. And I'm talking from health care aides, housekeepers, kitchen staff, nurses, doctors.' Adds Hanson: 'When I go to the departments today, I walk in, people are happy. They're generally happy to see me. They're laughing, they're joking, they're having a good time at their job like they should be.' Even though a provincially mandated report released in 2011 spoke of a toxic work environment at the hospital, Hanson never perceived that as the reality. 'Even two years ago when all of this hit the papers, it was not a toxic environment even then,' he says. 'I mean, there were certainly pockets of people that were dissatisfied. But to paint the whole place with that (is incorrect). It's a really good place to work and there's a lot of really caring and hard-working people that work there.' Assessment As CEO, Bryant shares that assessment of NHR employees. 'They are part of the community and they make a contribution to the community every day,' she says. 'So when Flin Flon gets a negative impression in the media, in the public, they take that very personally because that paints them as part of that. And that kind of negative publicity is not helpful to us in terms of our recruitment and retention.' Adds Bryant: 'Our staff are dedicated, they're committed, they provide passionate care every day with the patients at the centre of their caring, and they really just want to be able to do their work and do it in a way that is supported by the community that they support and that they live and work in.' Bryant says the NHR has been taking a proactive approach to further improve the work environment. Steps in that direction include: working toward a strategic goal of making the NHR an 'employer of choice' that attracts quality staff and retains existing staff; leadership development training for new and existing executive and management staff; ensuring there is a clear description of the requirements of each job, including behavioural requirements; maintaining a 'senior leadership team,' consisting of directors of the NHR, who regularly meet with executive management so that expectations are clear; quarterly leadership forums involving meetings between managers and those team leaders; development of an action plan to implement recommendations from a workplace audit conducted across the NHR; workplace safety and health committees that give employees another avenue to report workplace concerns; and developing an 'intranet' web page that will increase internal communication across the NHR with policy listings, bulletins, discussion groups and possibly blogs and chat rooms.
