Executive management seems hostile and determined to make it impossible to perform our jobs at a high level. We're in our fifth consecutive year of ever-increasing budget cuts, and yet our leadership team seems absolutely obsessed with growth via purchasing organizations, real estate, and facilities we literally cannot afford. This was understandable in Year 1 of COVID when everybody was taken by surprise. It's much less excusable in Year 5 of COVID.
As mentioned by previous reviews, the CDIO operates from a needlessly adversarial mentality that technology and clinical are in direct competition for funding, rather than working to leverage and multiply the effectiveness of clinical staff and resources using technology. We should be allowing technical people to lead technology and let the clinical leadership focus on clinical. There's only so many times anyone is willing to listen to "this is how many children you're killing by being paid your salary."
The latest scheme seems to be outsourcing the entirety of IT to a vendor who are currently also failing, due to being acquired by private equity and divesting themselves of all talent to be replaced by offshore contractors, and who are themselves expected to file for bankruptcy within the next twelve months.
The executive team has been engaging in bad faith, giving updates which are intentionally misleading or outright false. When asked directly whether layoffs were going to occur, the CDIO responded that none were planned. A few months later, a round of layoffs was announced along with a message about how lengthy and difficult a process it was determining who was going to be affected - demonstrating that the CDIO was already working on said layoffs while simultaneously denying that they were going to take place. When confronted directly, his response was that he had technically said that no "system-wide" layoffs would occur, and that this was a departmental process instead - relying upon that technicality to claim he hadn't been dishonest.
While asserting for months that no decision has yet been made regarding the outsourcing, there has been a continual trickle of details such as "when this happens you'll be a contractor with the vendor for a guaranteed six months minimum" and "this vendor has such great employee benefits" from the leadership team; details which make no sense and have no context if the outsourcing decision hasn't already been made and contract negotiations aren't well in process. Combined with the previous bad faith, this simply looks like intentional deception.
The consistent messaging throughout this process has been "You're lucky to have a job at all, just look at other hospital systems" (which seems disingenuous in a context of taking hundreds of jobs away) and "It's difficult being a leader and making unpopular decisions, you should all stop being angry and be supportive instead." That statement is true, but the anger has been driven by mismanagement and dishonesty from the C-suite, none of which has ever been acknowledged, not from the "unpopular decisions."
Leadership seem oblivious to staff morale. Announcing intent to lay off the entire department is bad enough, but ever since, it's been a nonstop stream of C-suite "updates" providing no new information but pushing the values of unity, common purpose, keeping together, motivation, investment, and open communication, all of which come across as extremely tone-deaf and little more than mindless platitudes.
Where to even begin with all the other problems outside the IT space which have been a source of continual black eyes to the org? Failing DEI programs resulting in staff still leaving because they don't feel safe, repeated issues with OR-acquired infections despite remediation, negligent care and alleged discrimination leading to patient death. All of these things have been in the news while I've been in my position here.
I cannot recommend Children's as an employer, particularly in IT, but that seems moot, because it seems unlikely that Children's wil. be looking to do technology hiring anytime soon.
