Well, I meant to write about this sooner. It's been news for about a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, my hospital was sold to county hospital district. But it's not official until November. It was a shock to hear this because I knew that if this hospital became public, a lot of doctors would leave (and this includes volunteer teaching attendings). No one really knew this was happening until it happened. I hate it when people are secretive and don't let any of the employees or my program know what's going on.
The good thing is our program director is contacting other hospitals as back up. We will stay at the possible public hospital only if it stays unopposed (no other residency programs) and that the training for residents doesn't diminish. And other hospitals are interested in providing us a place to train at and a lot of the same teaching attendings work at those hospitals as well.
The hospital says "that it plans to keep it a hospital for both private insured patients and noninsured patients". Yeah, that's pretty stupid. No private insured person in their right mind would go to a county hospital for care. Basically county was planning to build another hospital, but the location of this hospital was where a large population of uninsured were living at. So they wanted to instead buy this hospital rather than build another hospital. Also, this hospital is still making money, we are getting an increasing number of uninsured patients here.
One good thing that came out of this is - the hospital (not the residency program) gave every resident a raise in their salary - $3000. They did this as a way to compensate for the stress they caused us and to keep our program competitive with other FM residencies as interview season starts. This is because our residency program is not one the highest paid programs in the Houston area.
The name that people already came up with for my hospital is "Ben Taub South."
Well, I'll keep y'all updated on what's happening.
2 comments:
Wow...and I thought I was seeing a lot of unexpected and unwelcome changes. That is crazy, and must be stressful.
at first it was a bit stressful. but now, not so much. The program director is working hard contacting other hospitals who replied saying they would be happy to take us. But I would prefer to stay at my current hospital. we'll see. it's not official until november.
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