Following up on an earlier post, Massachusetts General Hospital has withdrawn its expansion plans for suburban outpatient facilities. Boston’s best in TV news, Katie Brace, has the details.
Katie, a Massachusetts native, is a Boston Marathon runner, and she has participated in Reach the Beach. When I ran the 200-mile event, I was one of twelve team runners. Katie was on an ultra team, with only six runners covering the distance from Mount Washington to the New Hampshire coast.
“I love telling a good story, animals & running.” – Katie Brace on Facebook
For a long time, Katie was with WBZ-TV, Boston’s CBS affiliate. After Covid hit, the station slashed its news department and Katie was one of the staff who was let go. Katie’s many fans (2,200 Facebook followers, 4,200 on Twitter) were glad when she announced she’d be staying in Boston, at NBC10.
I have learned that my former employer has, with only one day’s notice, announced background checks on all employees. Is management exempting itself? I’m still a shareholder. Maybe I should ask them.
The company has never had an HR department. A firm I’ve never heard of, Checkr, has been hired to conduct the background checks.
A quick check shows Checkr having a good reputation overall. But being right 9 out of 10 times isn’t good enough when someone’s livelihood is at stake.
Over a period of fifteen years I traveled to many rural American hospitals. Some of them were a long drive from a large airport. Others had a connecting flight aboard a twin-prop plane to a small regional airport.
In the years since then, some of those hospitals have closed. The crisis in rural healthcare continues to worsen.
Some hospitals here in greater Boston have closed, but for a very different reason. There were too many of them. Competitive pressures are ongoing, with Massachusetts General Hospital pursuing what some see as aggressive expansion plans.
Every six months I drive into downtown Boston for an appointment with an eye specialist. In late 1999, after suffering a spontaneous retinal detachment, I was left for blind by an incompetent eye surgeon in Worcester. I was referred to him by a optometrist in a neighboring town, who delayed seeing me after doubting my claim of a detached retina.
My sight was saved by a specialist at the Massachusetts Eye & Ear infirmary, who I found only because my boss’ wife worked there. Based on my own experience, the closer you get to Boston the better the medical care is.
P.S. This ad happened to pop up on Facebook. An ad for the place where my botched eye surgery was done.
“They’re not the most complicated things in the world.” — Kyle Kopec, 22, on managing hospitals
Kyle, it’s good that you’re enthusiastic about your challenging job at Braden Health, but if you last long enough doing it you’ll learn — and I hope admit — that hospitals are very complicated.
I had a visa to install a medical laboratory system in Pakistan.
The night before my scheduled flight out of Boston, a bus was firebombed outside of the Karachi hospital where I was going to work. As I watched the event on the CBS Evening News, my boss called and asked, “You seeing this?” With no need to specify what “this” was, I said “Yep.” He had just gotten off the phone with the big boss, and I was told, “You’re not going.” I never did, due to ongoing political unrest in Pakistan, culminating that year in the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73.
“The safety culture at Boeing fell apart. It was corrupted from the top down by pressures from Wall Street, plain and simple.”
That quote is from Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., in the Netflix documentary, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing. DeFazio led the Congressional investigation into the two Boeing 737 MAX crashes.
The tragedy of the MCAS-induced crashes began with the competition between Boeing and Airbus. Although Airbus receives EU government loans, that’s no excuse for the problems at Boeing. Those began when the corporate culture changed after the takeover of McDonnell Douglas.
As with the Wall Street crash of 2008, the failure of government regulators played a part in the tragedies. The FAA didn’t do its job, and DeFazio wants to know why.
For fifteen years I spent half of my time traveling on business, flying on planes. How well I remember Flight 66, a redeye non-stop from San Francisco to Boston, aboard a Lockheed L-1011, a big plane that I really liked. When my role changed at work, the times I flew became mercifully few and far between.
After I retired in 2017, many of the flights I took between Boston and Phoenix were aboard the brand-new MAX. The first time I saw one, I was surprised by how large the engines were, so I knew it wasn’t the same 737 I was familiar with from my years of business travel. Only one month after returning from Phoenix for the 20th and final time, the Lion Air 737 MAX crashed shortly after takeoff.
If you don’t have Netflix, Frontline has this documentary.
