Bartlett Regional Hospital CEO David Keith and CFO Sam Muse have resigned.
The hospital’s board of directors president, Kenny Robinson-Gross informed Bartlett workers about Keith’s resignation via an email on Tuesday. The president of the board said the hospital would “begin with making sure there is that the transition is smooth to this post. .”
The city manager Rorie Watt claimed that he had not talked to Keith about the reasons behind Keith’s departure.
“Obviously things have been a bit rough in recent times however, there could be a variety of reasons for it,” Watt said.
The resignations came a week after a hospital board member as well as doctor Lindy Jones informed the board that management and staffing issues were causing inadequate treatment of patients with behavioral health issues. In a letter addressed to the board that was first published in The Juneau Empire, Jones said there weren’t enough trained nurses and doctors to adequately care for the patients.
“In the thirty years I’ve been in the hospital I’ve never had a situation in which I were called upon to provide care for mental health patients without a emergency psychiatric care,” Jones wrote.
In the absence of enough staff to assess and provide care to patients, he noted that patients with behavioral health issues are being kept in the emergency rooms or taken into the main medical floors. In the general medical floor, they’ve developed “acutely upset and displayed violent outbursts in front other patients both in the ER and the unit for medical care,” he said.
Jones blamed hospital leaders for the problems with staffing. Jones cited “an extremely high rate in the rate of staff turnover” in the fields of psychiatry, clinical IT, and human resources because of an “lack of consistent, supportive and caring leadership,” threats of retaliation in response to perceived shortcomings in performance and the putting of unreasonable demands on employees .”
Juneau Empire reported that Juneau Empire reported that at the Tuesday board meeting Keith was defending his management style and claimed that he does not directly negotiate employee contracts. Keith also claimed that the limitations to the number of temporaries workers were excessively restricting.
In an email sent addressed to Bartlett staff, the employee Solomon-Gross wrote that “despite the divergences that were made at the board’s recent meeting, we share the same goal: to provide quality, safe patient treatment.”
” style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”Over the past six months the board has been tasked by the leadership with making difficult decisions regarding the financial health of the hospital and financial situation, which they acquired and have asked the leaders to set the hospital on the path towards sustainability,” he wrote. “This has demanded everyone change their ways – much more in a relatively shorter time frame than the hospital has made over the years. .”
Bartlett CFO Sam Muse is resigning, too. Sam Muse joined Bartlett as Controller in the month of August, 2022. He was appointed interim CFO in November, and was appointed the CFO on January.
span style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”At the end of the day, I place my duty to my family first of everything else, and I took a personal choice to do what I thought was most beneficial for our family,” Muse wrote in an announcement of his departure. “I am very proud of my experience at Bartlett. I am very proud of my colleagues at Bartlett. I will remain an supporter of the health care .”
The resignations of Keith and Muse is the most recent in a series of changes in the leadership over the last couple of years.
In September 2021 the Chief Executive Officer Rose Lawhorne resigned and then was dismissed by the board following an unprofessional relationship with one of her subordinates. She had been at the company over six months.
The Chief of Behavioral Health Bradley Grigg resigned the same week. About a year later he was convicted of taking 108,000 in hospital funds. The the CFO Kevin Benson and COO Vlad Toca were both released in January 2022.
