Hospice Workers Were Post Officed

Strange Tony,

Kindred Hospice isn't the only place with bad management.  Consider recent changes at the post office.

“Unfortunately, our production process within the plants was not fully aligned with this established schedule. So we had some delays in the mail, and our recovery process in this should have been a few days and it’s mounted to be a few weeks,” he said. “The only change that I made was that the trucks leave on time. Theoretically, everyone should have got their mail faster.”

Pressed by Senator Jacky Rosen, a Nevada Democrat, DeJoy declined to say what kind of analysis, if any, USPS had done before implementing the changes.

Losing the 671 mail sorting machines, in combination with other cuts, has led to mail moving more slowly through postal facilities, postal workers say,  

Management making universal decrees without analysis, input, testing or feedback.  Sound familiar?  The USPS, like Kindred Hospice, has a no overtime order.

Humana and its financial rapscallion partners trashed our one nationally recognized hospice.  They foisted Curo's myopic leadership and inadequate processes on us with no input from dedicated staff.  Curo ran a bunch of small hospices.  Our hospice was over three times the size of the average Curo site.  

Our mail sorting machines were staff.  Curo cut a big number initially saying technology would replace the work these dedicated people performed.  Curo's crappy technology created drastically more work for people who wanted to be paid fairly for hours worked and miles driven.  Staff cutting never stopped.  It was hard to see the company had any standard for new hires.  Repeatedly we got unqualified new people, usually with zero input from the "team."  

Curo gave us phone and computer systems that could spy on staff.  The phone system worked poorly making it difficult for families to reach our hospice in times of crisis.  Overworked nurses tried to document admissions and visits in Homecare Homebase's Gordian Knot software.  They would be disciplined, then fired for allowing their charts to go unfinished as this cost the company money.  Nurse eventually learned to say "no" to all rabbit trails and document their findings in one place, the clinical summary.  

Supposedly customer feedback was a critical measure.  It plummeted during all the changes with not a concern from local or regional management.  They refused to acknowledge or discuss indicators showing repeated service failure.

Staff turnover soared and has remained high.  We have very few experienced staff left.  Every quality hospice nurse resigned.  Some chose not to work 60-80 hour weeks and be paid for 40. 

Another mail sorting machine removed was our site's color printer.  We used it to create veteran certificates and other special items for patients and staff.  It had brand new ink cartridges installed.  Curo would not let us run down the ink, an expense already incurred.  The machine sat idle for a year while we paid a vendor to produce those Veteran Certificates and the company paid time and mileage for a staff member to pick those up.

Humana/Curo pulled a USPS on us.  Patients and families continue to pay the price in lesser quality service.   Like the post office hospice workers are not consulted on changes.  Rewards for good service are nonexistent.  

The management bar has fallen so low.  Why don't they open their eyes and ears?  Do they not care about workers and customers like the USPS?  They simply care about money and power.  For that the people suffer.

Anonymous