The Ann Plan

The strategic planning process has begun. This earthquake retrofitting stuff necessitates a new hospital building, so the turf building, fundraising and brainstorming has begun in earnest. The last real CEO we had, Ken Cohen planned heavily, in fact the executive team and the docs retreated deeply into the planning process, they weren’t seen for months. I guess strategy necessitates a secretiveness and withdrawal from the day to day, too many cooks in the kitchen and that sort of thing.

Anyway there’s a poverty of information and no means for working people to watch or participate in the strategic planning process, no union representatives or union members are invited allowed to attend. It’s sort of a Wizard of Oz situation. Since mums the word on the actual strategic plan, and I have to write about something, let me lay out “Ann’s Plan”.

Here’s the deal, a bigger hospital is better. Why ? Well the emergency room backs up onto the streets of Oakland and the numbers of uninsured show no signs of decreasing. Population’s up, car wrecks are up, average age is up, violence is up and last year’s flu season overfilled all the local hospitals. So even ignoring any natural disasters and outbreaks, we need the beds.

More importantly Highland’s currently too small and too resource starved to do the job right. We get the sickest of the sick and we keep them alive and get them going but that’s a far cry from comprehensive management of chronic illness and disability in the poor, and the elderly. What about cancer, TB, diseases of poverty and desperation? We can’t track cancer, we can’t support caregivers and families living with chronic illness, we provide care one crisis at a time. We have to get people out the door as quick as possible because of the long lines of sick people waiting in the Emergency Room.

Without hospital beds we can’t do the elective surgeries and procedures which increase patient’s function and health and ultimately decrease healthcare cost. The County Supes whine and moan about us spending money on chemotherapy, ventilators and cardiac drugs-the outrageous cost of healthcare. They never talk about the flip side: the cost of not providing healthcare; under medicated paranoid homeless people cost my community two small businesses and lots of people sadness and grief. How about angry juveniles who have no skills, no income and no parents because they lost their primary caregiver to a treatable illness? We have thousands of people who cannot function and the pull of their dependence, disease and pain affects us all. See, we’re dealing with the cost of not caring everyday in Oakland and it’s costing us more than the decent healthcare would.

Politicians babble about the breakdown of the family. Yo, bozos how about the breakdown of the public services which support families, there’s a problem you can fix.

I say let’s do it right, build a 200-bed hospital with subacute and skilled nursing beds in it. Take the speech therapists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and rehabilitation staff from the Fairmont Hospital and use them to optimize function and independence in all patients before discharge. Make the mission of the hospital to make all patients and families independent and functional. If we become the place medical problems can be heard and addressed we can start to fix our county’s disintegrated social services. You cannot cure people without caring for them and we should build a hospital that let’s us do just that.

Fairmont Hospital at Night

 

Fairmont Hospital at Dusk

Fairmont Hospital Late in the Day

Bye Lara!

Boo Hoo. Lara Bice-Sim Supervisor Keith Carson's healthcare point person is leaving for wetter climates and a lucky man. Lara's work in Carson's has helped the Medical Center immeasurably. She's beautiful, smart, ethical and kind. She will be so missed.

Highland Outside the ED

 

Treat’em and Street’em

Layoffs, reorgs, heat waves, crime waves and well, PMS. Is it just me, or is the planet getting warmer? Oakland and Highland have gotten hot enough, somebody please turn up the air and the funding. Did you know Sheriff Plummer and Susan Murahishi the County Administrator “bump” into each other over at the Claremont Spa? Seriously, I read it in Bizwoman. Maybe I’ll pop over at lunch and explain the situation to them.

Have our leaders all left town in the interest of personal comfort and safety? What’s up? One of America’s most wanted got killed a block from the hospital in June, over 410 crimes around the hospital so far this year and we get every trauma in Oakland.

How have the County Supervisors responded? Well they want to close the Rehabilitation Hospital at Fairmont. Great that’s helpful. So lets say you get shot and you’re a paraplegic, once we stop the bleeding, who’s going get you a wheel chair and teach you to use it. What about a stroke, shall we send these patients home with a brochure? How about Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Spinal Stenosis and people who get joints replaced?

While San Francisco moves toward comprehensive care, chronic illness management, and prevention, Dave Kears and the County Supes who love him pushing for cost containment at its meanest. All the Medical Center needs is an emergency room and a couple of cots according to Dave. All you need is an emergency room- it’s Dave’s treat’em and street’em healthcare cost containment plan.

Highland Night

 

 

 

Save Our City Land

As you may or may not know local politicos fund their campaigns by sweet deals with developers and public land givaways. State Senator Perata and his loyal servants ( Ignacio De La Fuente, Larry Reid, Jean Quan and Henry Chang) want to sell off Oakland school land and the Oakland waterfront (the Oak to Ninth Development) and the supes want Fairmont Hospital and Highland if they can get it. The greedy bastards also want the Peralta College land over by Laney.

Oaklander's have wised up to the real estate rip-off , a coalition has formed to fight the Oak to Ninth Development. I'm giving them my time and money, so should you.

Here's the link http://www.abetteroaktoninth.org/

Welcome

 

Help, I Need a Brochure!

No, this is not “normal,” 78 murders in Oakland this year. Real estate at all-time highs and earnest Berkeley/Albany parents worried about their kids getting shot at parties. We have more money, more desperation, more death and violence than in years past.

County Supervisor Nate Miley’s office said, “Well, that’s Oakland and the City Council’s responsibility.” I said, “ We have nothing for people, no support services to offer the broken, the battered and the frightened.”

Nate Miley got lots of great press for his violence prevention program and feels he’s spent enough resources on Oakland. I sounded so pitiful on the phone that Miley’s staff felt sorry for me and said they’d send over a brochure.

I didn’t bother calling my City Council Member, Jean Quan. Jeanie prefers not to talk about crime: it frightens people who vote.

So my dear friends and co-workers if it feels like we’re standing alone in a flood of violence, diseases of desperation and community disintegration that’s because we are. Politicians say they want to help the sick, the poor, the injured, the unparented and the over and under-medicated but the truth is they don’t mean it.

See, the county hospital catches all the fabulous failures of our bureaucratic and inept county and city services. Jails fail to prevent chronic illness and disability, compassionately release inmates to Highland. Adult Protective Services fails to protect –that’s right Highland. A nursing home ships a psychotic patient from Hopunk California because they get paid extra to take care of the guy and they realize he bites and throws feces. No problem, send him to Highland. How about Behavioral Health they cost effectively under-manage mental illness and substance abuse for years and then just send their clients to the Highland. Violence prevention fails to prevent violence, that’s right, let Highland deal with it.

That’s why our patients and our hospital get defunded and attacked by politicians: we take care of people. Politicians hate us because we remind them of their failures. They don’t come to Highland to see victims of violence and their families – they hold Summits and press conferences to talk to campaign donors and to expound on how much they are doing about the problem.

See, people fall between the bureaucratic cracks. County’s all about spreadsheets, power points and political pork programs; it’s no longer about people or their problems. Caregiving has become an act of political defiance. So, for all you baby docs, yes, our leaders indifference is more frightening than the carnage and yes, it is up to us the fix world as well as our patients. But don’t despair Supervisor Nate Miley is going to send us a helpful brochure!

Personals

“Bald, black and broke.”
-San Francisco Bay Guardian Personal Ad

I almost answered that ad, I figured at least the dude’s honest. For the record, my husband has a full head of hair and a job and so you wonder what do personal ads have to do with the job, the Medical Center. Well, the subject of relationships has come up.

For the last ten years I’ve done lots of moonlighting. My second job consists mainly of working with other folks to keep my first job open. We’ve, rallied, vigilled, blogged leafleted, called, faxed and emailed. We had a “fire Dave Kears” campaign and rally once. I stood two cars away from a huge spotless sedan in a reserved parking space in the county lot when then Supervisor Mary King came out, turned red, and ripped our literature from her windshield and shredded it.

Mary and I had a relationship. She misrepresented me, my values and my interests and I called, faxed and flyered her with what I felt was helpful information. That’s as much relationship as I need with a politician. I just want them to do the right thing; I don’t want to do lunch.

When activists, organizers, and wonks get together into groups with bylaws, committees and minutes the strategy discussion often becomes should we compromise with a politician who’s not doing the right thing so we can build a “relationship” or should we do something that would make a difference.

The whole notion that the Medical Center should be subsidizing the county budget with “debt” and “interest” payments is a big hot steaming pile of horse…..

I feel so hurt, so dirty, so used, I thought we had a “relationship” with the board of supes. Boo hoo.

Go Gavin!

Free love, good eats and universal healthcare. Gavin Newsom beat Dellums to universal healthcare. Read all about it. Click here:

http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/ci_4069114

Discussing Utopian Visions of Healthcare

Wright Lassiter III CEO. ACMC (left)
Ron Dellums Mayor-Elect of Oakland (right)

Terremoto

Leave it to the Supes to use a natural disaster as an opportunity to dismantle the Medical Center. All hospitals must be earthquake safe by 2012 to be in compliance with state regulation. Kaiser got the go ahead to expand and the Supes blessings but the poor Medical Center trustees are out behind the back room arguing with the Supes. The Supes want to build an outhouse and the hospital trustees and Wright Lassiter III want to build a hospital.

That’s the kind of progressive visionary thinking Alameda County deserves. In the event of a major earthquake the hospital will crumple and prisons will be left standing. If current county budgetary trends continue, getting jailed might be the only way for the uninsured to get healthcare.

Wright Lassiter III Doing Diligence

Alameda County Medical Center CEO Wright Lassiter III will discuss his
strategic vision for ACMC at the next Vote Health general membership
meeting.

The meeting will be held at 7:00 pm

on Monday, July 17

California Nurses Association located at 20th and Franklin Streets, Oakland

For more information, please call 510-832-8683.

The Oakland City Council will vote on a resolution in support of SB
840, Sheila Kuehl's single payer bill, the following night, Tuesday, July 18th.
The city council meeting begins at 6 p.m. at city hall.

Kay Eisenhower,
Chair Vote Health

Dave Kears

 

Dave Kears’ Weed Not Greed Treatment Center

That’s right! The time has come to identify and treat Alameda County’s most pernicious, widespread and contagious social problems. It’s an epidemic, a pandemic and it’s maiming and killing thousands- it’s a scourge, a plague, it’s the “green death.” That’s right it’s greed. Overpaid overfed bureaucrats, policy shakers and makers, politicians have gotten richer and richer undeserving the poor. The Sheriff, Dave Kears (Director of Health Services) and Susan Muranishi (Chief Administrative Officer) salaries are over half a rock and that’s without kickbacks, pensions, junkets and free food.

They vote themselves frequent fat raises while cutting and privatizing public services like healthcare. They give themselves awards and hold fancy parties for other greedy people and everyone congratulates each other as they divide up the public funds for the next fiscal year. It’s a public health crisis: TB, AIDS, homelessness, sexual exploitation of children and imprisonment in general are all up and our leaders are throwing a victory party with melon martinis and novelty napkins.

The time has come to take county government and medical marijuana to a higher level. All the “top dogs” will live communally in the Weed Not Greed Treatment Center.

Let’s take a quick look at our leaders after a week of intensive treatment:

Dave used his left toes to pick up a pair of worn running shorts, he kicked them into the air and caught them in his right hand knocking over a lamp and a half can of beer in the process. He grabbed a chair with his left hand and stepped into the shorts pulling them up over his bare ass. He looked under a pile of clothes for a shirt but couldn’t find one, and wandered out of the room shirtless and shoeless looking for his friends.

Charley Plummer wore an open black bathrobe and sat fully reclined in a pink vinyl Lazy Boy, in the common room. Susan Muranishi lay on the red rug on the floor. One of her favorite Gucci silk scarves tied around her breasts as a top. She lay very still but her belly button ring, a plastic peace sign with a bell jingled each time she breathed. She sounded like a snoring cat.

Dave: “Hey Chuck, I’m so sorry about last night, that was my bad.”
Charley: “No problem, Dave I’ve been known to get a little psychedelic myself.”
Dave: “That’s righteous of you dude, I think I love you.”
Charley: “I love you to.”
Dave: “I mean it Chuck, your kindness will never be obliterated.”

See at Dave’s Weed Not Greed Treatment Center the motto is why get rich when you could get high? Dare to care, dare to share. Toke for a cure: treating corporate crime one spliff at a time.

You can support Dave Kears’ Weed Not Greed Clinic by participating in the “Toke for a Cure” Smoke Out and Chocolate Chip Cookie Competition.