2009 in Review – the People Pillar

Posted on Jan 27, 2010 | 0 comments

2009 was a tough year for a lot of people and many businesses, and health care was not immune to those challenges. Fortunately at CPMC we have a number of terrific assets, the most important of which is the people who work here.

At CPMC we use six Pillars to measure our performance; those are Quality, People, Service, Finance, Growth, and Community. So how did we do with our People pillar?

PEOPLE

We started out 2009 on a high note. We had the best results ever on the Sutter-wide EOW survey: the 80th percentile, meaning that our employees were in the upper 20% of all health care employees in terms of overall job satisfaction. We had substantial improvement is most categories, as did almost every other Sutter facility, perhaps because many of our employees appreciated the experience of working at CPMC more this year due to the downturn in the national economy.

Unions

As some of you know, we are out-of-contract with both SEIU-UHW and CNA. We would much prefer having long-term collective bargaining agreements with both of these unions; the uncertainty is not particularly helpful either for us or for our employees. We have been negotiating with both SEIU-UHW and CNA for a long time, with some progress.

I’d like to see us come to agreements soon, but I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking that we can agree to contracts that we cannot afford or manage simply to get an agreement. The economy has still not recovered; there is much uncertainty about what is going to happen in health care (I’ll be blogging about this in a few weeks); the costs of employee benefits (particularly health insurance) continue to go up; and we need to be responsible employers.

As a health care organization, we have two special obligations: first, to make sure that our employees have good health insurance, and second, to avoid making commitments to our employees that will make health care less affordable for everyone else.

I’m sure all of you have had the experience of speaking with someone who can no longer afford health insurance, and I believe that we need to set an example rather that exacerbating what is already a very difficult problem.

Looking Ahead

We’re very pleased that we graduated the final class of nurses in a four-year partnership with City College of San Francisco supported by the Betty Irene Moore Strategic Partnership Grant. If you’re one of the 85 new nurses we’ve added to the profession, welcome to CPMC.

If you haven’t already, I hope you soon get to meet Mark Kimbell, the new President of the CPMC Foundation, who succeeded Jerry Mapp, now in emeritus status.

Of course, this is the year that Martin Brotman MD moved from CPMC to become the Regional Executive Officer of Sutter West Bay, and that many members of our team took on additional responsibilities for the West Bay region.

And our long-time Executive Vice President and Administrator, Jack Bailey, retired on January 1. We send him and his wife Marsha our very best wishes, and deep gratitude for his many contributions to CPMC.

As always, I’m interested in hearing from you. If you’d like to leave a response, or ask a question, just post a comment below.