Pros
The benefits were good - dental/health/ retirement/ tuition remission. My coworkers were great.
Cons
I should have known when I began the onboarding process that this employer was a disaster. Zero communication from onboarding staff and HR and a confusing process that took forever and almost delayed my start date were not good signs. The turnover was another huge red flag. 10 out of 30 care coordinators quit in the same month my first year. The same thing happened my second year. Nothing was done by management to help lessen the burden that was thrust on staff in order to make up for the loss of a third of our coordinators. No preparations were made to hire replacements in a timely fashion. No preparation was made for training these replacements. Brand new employees were thrust into positions that required a year of training. Care Coordinators were told they didn't have a choice about running a clinical practice. Running a clinical practice is a job that requires a raise and promotion, but new hires were told that's now how things were done and received no compensation for extra work. When you became good at your job, you were asked to do another person's job. Often we were asked to do two or 3 people's jobs at once without any extra pay or compensation. Doctors and nurse practitioners treated us as personal assistants, often asking us to do work that was clinical in nature, knowing well that they made 4 to 5 times the money we did. They could be rude and condescending. I received emails with one line from a doctor "why didn't you do this" when the task in question was actually not legally allowable for me to do. If that wasn't enough, our managers gaslit and lied to us. Whenever a meeting was called, not a single positive thing was mentioned about the work we did, but plenty was to be said about where to improve. When we worked 10 hours of overtime in a week (sometimes working 10-12 hour shifts with no lunch break), we received condescending emails from our managers if we were 7 minutes late the next day. Very little support was offered to leave at our scheduled time. I often missed appointments that I had scheduled because I wasn't able to leave. No support was offered for anyone to take lunch, and it was company culture that no one did. When meetings were opened up for questions or comments about policies or practice changes, our concerns were immediately discounted and invalidated by our managers. "That's just how it is going to be" was the attitude with zero thought about how it might impact us. To feel constantly unsupported and exhausted while the children that are the patients are dying was too much. In January (while the nurses were striking at other hospitals for lower patient/nurse ration) MSK decided to lay off a thousand employees (including nurses), thus raising the patient:nurse ratio at MSK to unsafe levels. They claimed they had lost money during the pandemic and ceased many programs (COVID vaccination, tuition remission, raises) that year. As a Care Coordinator, my job became about billing and how many patients we could take on, which became unmanageable. We physically did not have the space and providers for all of the patients that the hospital kept forcing us to take on which delayed critical treatment for kids. Working so hard for so little money, continuously being taken advantage of for doing a good job, and being surrounded by people who are rude and condescending was too much for me. I would not recommend this job to anyone. I hope that MSK will change their culture to make staff stay. It's no surprise to me why there's so much turnover, but the management certainly seems shocked every time. I hope they will learn to open their eyes and ears.
