Another casualty has hit PeaceHealth, and no one’s talking publicly about what happened. Dr. Mark Adams, who joined the health system as community chief medical officer, is gone and didn’t even last a year. Employees learned about Adams’ departure from a cryptic note saying he was no longer with the organization, but nothing was said about what led to his departure.
At the same time, PeaceHealth employees learned that the system vice president in charge of corporate compliance had also departed along with the system director of risk management. Their names were not available by press time.
Adams had a very distinguished vitae when he joined the PeaceHealth Medical Group, which has more than 700 providers, 10 hospitals and multiple ambulatory centers and clinics. At PeaceHealth he was in charge of leading the $2 billion system’s clinical strategies.
He seemed to be quite pleased about his new role, saying, "PeaceHealth is an organization with a great reputation and mission-driven focus. I've been in the Northwest a long time so I know that PeaceHealth is well organized and a high integrity organization. I look for that as a differentiator."
Quest and PeaceHealth
Following the sale of its laboratory services to Quest Diagnostics, which was first reported in The Lund Report, Vancouver-based PeaceHealth has announced it will eliminate an additional 85 jobs in Lane County in late May, according to an article in the Register-Guard. Most of those who will be laid off work at PeaceHealth Labs’ headquarters at the RiverBend Annex in the former Sony plant, near Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield.
Quest started offering jobs on Tuesday with start dates of April 3 and 10. “The union is trying hard to organize the lab as a last ditch effort to save jobs,” according to a lab worker who spoke with The Lund Report. “But unfortunately it seems that a lot of long-term employees are blinded and still believe that PeaceHealth will save their jobs. The only thing that PeaceHealth needs to keep under their umbrella for its Level II Trauma Center designation is microbiology and the blood bank.”
Phlebotomists doing blood sugars for inpatients at the hospital are likely to be laid off because that role can easily be handed off to the nursing staff.
“That alone generates $1.5 million for the hospital,” the lab worker said. Recently PeaceHealth removed all the blood sugar machines off the walls so they could repaint, saying they were buying new machines. “That might be true but I don’t think they’re planning to hang back those machines because they’ll put nurses in charge of doing the blood sugars. Just you wait and see.”
Diane can be reached at [email protected].
