Editorial

April 23rd, 2009

Guest Editorial/Commentary
Jim Trageser
North County Times

No Sense of Accountability at PPH

The cost of the new hospital being built west of the Escondido Auto Park is already 23 percent more than what voters were told when we voted on it (closing in on $1 billion) ---- and last week, the district announced that they forgot to include the $30 million cost of moving into the new hospital.

Of course, they don't know the true cost of the moving expenses. No, they're (we're) paying a consultant more than $1 million to plan the move (er, "transition" in bureaucratese), including calculating the actual costs.

Yet, there's no sense of outrage reported from the board. No warnings to administrators to step up or start looking for new jobs.

I know moving a hospital is complex ---- a point Marcia Jackson, the district's chief planning officer, made in explaining the $1 million contract. But you know what? It's not that complicated.

Let's break the move down to its basic components:

-- Conduct an equipment inventory in the existing hospital building: beds, chairs, desks, computers, medical monitoring equipment, etc.

-- Determine which equipment can be used in the new building, and make a list of equipment that will need to be ordered new.

-- Order new equipment.

-- Calculate the weight and volume of what needs to be moved, and contact a moving company for a quote.

-- Schedule overlapping staffing for the period when the physical move.

-- Schedule a few hours of orientation at the new building, so staff knows what's where, how the new equipment and phones work, etc.

-- Give the computer geeks enough time to set up the new network.

-- Figure out whether to move patients from the old facility to the new, or to keep both open with overtime staffing for a few days.

There's your list of what needs to be done. Say you're paying someone $100,000 a year in salary and benefits to oversee your facilities. That $1 million contract assumes it would take that supposedly highly trained person 10 years to figure out the answers to the above questions.

I can't see how a competent three-person team could take more than a week to inventory the hard equipment in a hospital. You walk in each room, make a list of what's in there, and move on to the next. Once you have your list, it will take any moving and storage company about 10 minutes to calculate the freight to move across town. (A quick call to a couple of North County moving companies confirmed that there are specialists in corporate relocation ---- I was told that even a good-sized hospital like Palomar could get a quote within 24 hours.)

The fact that UCLA spent $25 million moving into a new facility last year doesn't calm my sense that nobody at Palomar Pomerado gives a darn about the taxpayers' money. UCLA is also a public hospital. Show me a private-sector hospital that drops $30 million on moving and staff orientation expenses (and another $1 million on planning the move) and I'll eat my words.

Contact staff writer Jim Trageser at
jtrageser@nctimes.com
or (760) 740-5408.