Expecting an overwhelming amount of public comment concerning the public removal of credentials that allowed Estes Park Health Foundation President Kevin Mullin access to the medical center grounds and his office, the Estes Park Health board voted to rearrange the agenda for it’s Wednesday night meeting so public comments would occur after the board conducted other business.
EPHF Vice Chair Dennis Hoshiko addressed the EPH board to say that when Vern Carda, the EPH CEO, banned Mullin’s access to the hospital, “this board has amplified the community’s distrust of hospital leadership and rendered the foundation dysfunctional.”
Furthermore, he said, “what was done to terminate Kevin’s job, unjustly, has also currently terminated the foundation’s ability to raise funds for Estes Park Health successfully.”
“Consequently, I cannot, in good conscience, justify volunteering as a foundation director any longer, and therefore I hereby publicly submit my resignation, which is effective immediately. And I also want the public record to show that I’m now turning in my official resignation, along with my hospital ID badge, foundation, name tag and business cards,” Hoshiko said before leaving the meeting room.
A copy of Hoshiko letter of resignation was provided to the Estes Valley Voice.
In response, David Batey, president of the EPH board, said, “standard best practices were followed as this matter developed over a period of months,” and the board had been periodically informed about issues during that time. He also said that the letter he originally authored, was revised 19 times, and eventually sent under Carda’s signature, had been reviewed by legal counsel. The document metadata on the letter sent out indicated that Batey was the author.
“I fully support the actions taken by the Estes Park Health CEO and the communication to the Foundation Board. I think it’s important to know those things,” Batey said.
Caprissa Frawley also addressed the hospital board members to share her experience of working at the hospital and being terminated from her position as a patient access representative in the infusion department. Frawley, who worked in the infusion department, went before the board to tell of the humiliation she experienced in being bullied in her job by a supervisor and she begged Carda to meet with her to discuss her experience as an employee.
In an interview with the Estes Valley Voice after her public comments, Frawley, who has lived in Estes Park for more than 20 years, said she had nothing to lose by being public with her concerns about the work environment at EPH, the loss of local employees, and the high number of locum tenens or “traveling nurses” who are contracted to fill in at the hospital. “The expense that goes out is a huge loss,” said Frawley.
Frawley also said that comments made earlier by Carda at Wednesday night board meeting during a presentation about how EPH was addressing issues such as workplace violence do not take into consideration the toxic workplace environment created by supervisors and traveling nurses who do not have a vested interest in the community or the hospital.
Frawley said she was subject to repeated examples of “abuse, lies, and gaslighting” as an employee. “You cannot report retaliation. You are going to get hurt,” said Frawley. “I was honored to work there. This is my community. I was honored to be there for the patients and the people in my community. Those people meant everything to me,” Frawley said who said in trying to report problems as a whistleblower, she experienced bullying and was terminated.
“I wanted to ask him in front of the public to meet with me because if I had just called, he would not have agreed,” said Frawley. Carda told Frawley from the dais that he and Pat Samples, the chief nursing officer, would meet with her.
During the public comment portion of the meeting Larry Leaming, former EPH CEO and now a Foundation board member, asked “How do you see the EPH board and the foundation board moving forward to rectify the situation and work together in the best interest of the community?”
“I think we do need to find a way to move forward, and for the community to have excellent healthcare going forward in the future,” said EPH board member Cory Workman. “It is important for us to find ways to work together. I personally have really wrestled with some of the some of the ideas of how we can help, help all of us to work together. At the end of the day, I would hope that we all want to continue to have excellent, top notch, the best rural healthcare that we possibly can have. I appreciate you all being here and taking the time to share your comments.”
Before the meeting adjourned board member Drew Webb said he wanted a “cooling off period for the next few weeks.” According to Webb, “The issue we have right now is we’re being inundated with questions from a newspaper organization that is a distraction to the management, the board and other people that are working on this transaction. And I’m not saying these questions aren’t important and don’t need to be addressed. I’m just asking if we can just hold off on some of the pressure to get some of these things answered for a few weeks so we can basically complete what we have been trying, what we have been working on for the past year and a half or whatever it has been.”
Batey also refused to provide any information on the active investigation being conducted by the Colorado Health Facilities and Emergency Medical Services Division which regulates heath care facilities, including EPH. The organization has been onsite at the hospital this week.
The HFEMSD is a division of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Alexandrea Kallin, the public affairs and communications specialist in the Fiscal and Administrative Services Branch confirmed that the agency is conducting an active investigation at this time. Once the investigation is complete, information will be listed on the division’s website which can be searched by the public.
The Estes Valley Voice also reached out to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The following written statement from CMS was provided in response, “CMS investigates alleged violations and works with the appropriate parties to identify if a violation has occurred and how to remediate the issue. CMS, State Agencies (SAs), and State Medicaid Agencies (SMAs) are responsible for holding participating providers and suppliers of health care services accountable for meeting federal requirements. However, CMS does not disclose specific information about ongoing investigations as disclosure could compromise the integrity of the investigative process.”
Duck – Deny – Deflect
I attended the PHD board meeting on Wednesday to witness the ongoing dysfunction, rather than depending solely on the comments others have provided in the EVV and personal discussions around town.
Duck – the EPH CEO, Mr. Vern Carda demonstrated his incompetence in three ways. First, Mr. Carda’s financial presentation included non-operating income to inflate his version of EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). An experienced financial professional knows that EBITDA is an economic measure of operational performance. By including the property taxes we citizens pay to the PHD, along with other, undisclosed items of non-operating income, the CEO claimed his inflated EBITDA showed things are on track. This is ignorance at best, and deception at worst. Second, the CEO lauded EPH’s employee turnover of more than 20% was only .1% worse than the national average. Is average something to brag about? Is average what we the taxpayers are subsidizing? Shouldn’t the hospital’s senior leadership aspire to, and the taxpayers expect, exemplary? Perhaps this explains the CEO’s ongoing reluctance to engage an outside consultant to gauge employee satisfaction. Third, the CEO took victory laps by mentioning and re-mentioning a $4 million reduction in contract labor as if that was a net gain. He did not, however, share information on the offsetting increase in wages, payroll taxes, and benefits, as well as the economic and intellectual losses from maintaining an “average” employee turnover rate.
Deny – the board chair, Mr. David Batey, apparently anticipating blowback over the controversy involving the Foundation President, Kevin Mullin, stated that the situation was an “operational matter” for which the PHD board merely provided oversight and consulted with the board’s outside legal counsel. This flies in the face of the metadata report attached to the Microsoft Word document used to terminate Mr. Mullin, which the EVV recently published. Despite Mr. Batey’s statement, the metadata report clearly shows Mr. Batey authored the letter. This level of participation in an “operational matter” (particularly against a leader of an independent 501(c)(3) charitable organization) would appear to be an abuse of power by an elected official and certainly a breach of the PHD By-Laws. Metadata is often used as evidence in a legal proceeding, providing information such as the author, the device used to create the document and when the document was created. I believe we have not heard the last about the conflict between Mr. Batey’s statements and his actions.
Deflect – One of the board members, Drew Webb, took the opportunity near the end of the meeting to blame the lack of progress on the issue of affiliation on “newspapers” and the residents of Estes Park who have shared comments and personal experiences regarding the work environment at EPH. Although Mr. Webb professes to be a guru on mergers and acquisitions, he doesn’t appear to be willing to accept any responsibility for the lack of progress by the PHD board on that front. Instead, he trotted out the old blame game against the media and whistleblowers to hide his own, personal lack of performance.
Mr. Webb’s attempt to deflect, Mr. Batey’s disingenuous denial, and Mr. Carda’s incompetence remind me of the line from the 1971 Pogo comic strip, “We have met the enemy, and he is us”.
I have heard from a couple people that “the public doesn’t know both sides of the story.” Yet, when one of the board members is asked to share information with a journalist, the response is “that is a distraction to the management, the board and other people that are working on this transaction. … . I’m just asking if we can just hold off on some of the pressure to get some of these things answered for a few weeks so we can basically complete what we have been trying, what we have been working on for the past year and a half or whatever it has been.”
Whatever amount of time has it been Mr. Webb? And why does everyone involved have to agree to a non-disclosure agreement? I pay property taxes which go to support the hospital. Your fiscal responsibility is to me and all the other community members who contribute to that funding. I appreciate that you and others have volunteered for this effort but I wonder what your motivation actually is?
What does it take to recall the board and put in competent people?
I attended the hospital board meeting last week. The foundation is going to miss Dennis Hoshiko’s leadership, he is a great man. Steve Alper, Drew Webb and David Batey said that they fully support Vern’s actions in getting Kevin Mullin fired. David Batey wrote the document that was supposedly from Vern according to the meta data so it is obvious where he stands. We don’t need people who endorse bad behavior on the hospital board, anyone who read those documents can see what happened in this situation. Thank God we have the Estes Valley Voice or we would not know any of this. There is an election coming up in May. Fortunately David Batey is term limited. Our community must recruit two people to run as change candidates in the next election. Drew Webb cannot win another term to continue the destruction and incompetence of the past 4 years. When we get new board members in place the first action needs to be to appoint a new CEO. We have a few months to figure this out so we can save our hospital before the people in charge destroy it beyond repair.
I hope they can get these matters resolved quickly. The major demographic of this community is over 50. They need a healthcare system that they can count on and functions in their best interest. Healthcare is not much different than justice, when it’s delayed, it’s denied.