Personal Experience: Unqualified people on the job

[Horse with no Name]

I worked at a very prestigious world-renowned hospital in Dallas.
The floor that I worked on was highly specialized. We dealt with liver transplants, trauma and surgery. Patients flew in from all over the world to have their surgeries performed by some of the best surgeons in the world. Our floor was considered elite, and only the best of the best worked there.
The floor director and the floor manager both had many years of experience in floor nursing, as well as nurse management. One was more beloved than the other, but that is hardly the point.
The mean level of experience when I went to work there was well over 20 years. It never failed that if you had something you had never seen before (and that was always possible) that someone that you worked closely with had seen it and could guide you through.
All surgeons have idiosyncrasies of how they like things done on their certain patient population. This was never a problem because everyone made certain that their colleagues all knew these things.
However, the floor manager decided to leave. This position was not replaced for a length of time. We all knew what needed to be done, scheduling was done cyclically, and we really didn't have problems.
But then personal circumstances came up for our director to leave, thus necessitating the appointment of another director.
We were given a director that had very little experience but had always been a paperwork nurse. No patient experience...couldn't start an IV if her life depended on it.
She in turn brought in a nurse manager who had just graduated from school--another paperwork nurse. No idea of what it took to run a successful high acuity unit. To give you an idea...on some liver transplant patients, it was not unusual for that patient to be assigned two nurses who ONLY took care of this patient. However, because he had no experience, he made the decision to assign ONE nurse to these patients, and gave her ANOTHER patient to take care of. Saving money you know. This was not safe. Not for the patient, the nurse, or the doctor. (this hospital was well funded in grants and trusts. The administrator was the highest paid in the country).
This manager had been a manager in the oilfield for years, so his experience was in the bottom line, not in life and death.
It had always been the practice that when someone with experience left, they had hired someone with experience. There was NEVER more than one graduate nurse on the floor at a time. In this way, this nurse could be mentored by an entire staff to make her a valuable member of the team.
However, because of staffing considerations and increasingly heavier and unsafer patient loads, many of the experienced nurses started leaving.
These were all replaced with graduate nurses, who were cheaper. But even more insidious, because they didn't know better.
They weren't going to complain about unsafe situations, they were just thrilled to work on a unit that had such a great repuation.
Mistakes started being made. Patients were dying. I could tell you stories that would make you cry--and there was a racist component to it.
The transplant surgeons pulled their patients off of the floor because they weren't safe. Some of the other specialty surgeons started doing their more complicated surgeries at other Dallas hospitals.
Our reputation was gone.
By now, our mean level of experience had gone down to 2-3 years.
The experienced nurses spent ALOT of time babysitting nurses that didn't know what they were doing. They weren't properly mentored and quite frankly, they were killing and injuring patients.
At one time, to be a charge nurse on this unit, you had to have quite abit of experience. Now, all it took was a RN. It didn't matter if you only had that RN one week, you were charge nurse material.
I found that when you are inexperienced, you tend to surround yourself with inexperienced people. That way, you never are made to feel incompetent.
Perhaps that is what * is doing.
But I fear for my country the same way that I feared for those patient's lives.

[Neocondriac]

1. That's how yes men are born....

Take someone who is advanced well beyond their capabilities as well as their wildest dreams into positions that ever their family members are shocked they're in and voila you have a fully complicit yes man or woman.Look at this cabinet, from Rummy down they reek of this.Gonzalez, Brown, Rice not a lick of integrity and conscience between any of them.

[hobbit709]

2. Same story here

I was working as a tech in a circuit board manufacturing plant. Our supervisor took another position and his replacement was taken off the production line and promoted because she had "management" experience. Her experience consisted of being the assisrant produce manager at a local grocery. She wouldn't have known what an electron was if it bit her on the ass. But she was in charge of 15 techs whose job it was to troubleshoot and repair any boards that failed testing after coming off the line.
I had about 25 boards of one kind that all failed the same test. The procedure was if there were more than 5 fails of the same kind on a production run, the run was halted until the problem was solved. I figured out the interface connectors were not the same part number as on the good boards and told her that. She insisted that they were an alternate part and the test beds needed to be reprogrammed.
I didn't have access clearance to look up alternate part numbers but she did. For an hour I tried to convince her to look up the number-she refused.
Finally she got tired of my bitching and looked it up-the right alternate part ended in-01, these were -03s. Meanwhile about 400 boards came off the line, all with the wrong parts. 16 of these connectors on each board had to be removed and replaced by the rework people- about a 2 hour process by hand since they couldn't be run through the machine anymore.
An engineer told me later that it cost about $25K for that little fuck-up.
But she had "management" experience.

[MindPilot]

6. Lemme guess, she used her "management experience"

to take credit for isolating the problem and limiting the rework costs to *only* $25K.

If I was you, I would've gone ahead and let her order the test bed re-programming and sat back and watched the fun. But I'm like that.

[catmandu57]

3. A very good analogy

The same thing is happening with our country and the disastrous appointments the idiot* in chief is making. We can't leave however, and if our elected reps don't step up on this one we're truly phucked.

[MindPilot]

4. I saw the same thing happen in car dealers

Used to be that to be a service writer, you had to have had at least some experience on the shop floor. And the service manager was the best of the writers. Then it became more important that the service manager have "business experience" than technical skills, and that filtered down to writers. Now when you take your car in to have it worked on, you're dealing with people who have lots of "marketing skills" but are close to clueless regarding what actually has to happen to get your car running right again.

[whatever4]

5. And it all wouldn't be so bad, if we weren't already cooked

but right now, there's so much going on, we couldn't have run into a corrupt admin at a worse time. Peak oil, global warming, health care and on and on, it would have been difficult enough with the best of leaders, under the best of circumstances, to lead America safely to a better future.

But with this admin? I think all they're succeeding in doing is hiding the downward falling axe from the American people. I guess blindfolded is better, I guess.