Highland Consultants Cut Waste and Fat

Cambio did it; they found the fat and waste. They announced their long awaited lay-off list. Cambio’s cut list spared the bloated middle management structure. They concentrated their efforts mostly on laying-off clerks, housekeepers, and patient care providers.

The emergency room will lose all its nursing assistants. I guess we’d rather pay an RN or MD to push a gurney to a broken elevator and wait there to take the patient to their room. It can take up to an hour to get a patient from the emergency department to a room and we’ve just doubled or tripled the salary of the staff that will perform this task. Then I suppose the doctor will come back and clean the equipment for the next patient. But hey, there is an upside with Highland’s highly unreliable elevators it’s probably is safer to have a registered nurse or doctor riding them at all times.


They also hit housekeeping hard-that makes sense, patients often complain that Highland’s just too clean. Maybe it’s that excessive cleanliness that results in so many patients with multi-drug resistant infections. I’m sure the cost of excessive cleaning has driven many businesses into financial ruin. Isn’t that what happened with Enron?

Medical clerks, there’s another huge waste. Why do you need someone on a nursing floor who can decipher physician’s orders or coordinate admissions and discharges. It just takes all the fun out of medicine. Nurses should just guess what the doctor wrote, and since they can’t read the signatures either, just guess who wrote it. As for discharges, well if they go slow enough patients will learn to get themselves home. Admissions, well that should be less of a problem because now that doctors will be doing transport and equipment cleaning we’ll be expecting far fewer admissions.

You just have to give it to those consultants and many of the staff would like to, but you just can’t find them. One was spotted last week scurrying up the backstairs.