so shit’s fucked in privatized healthcare with covid. The point of this is to illustrate how the bullshit of the personal responsibility narrative goes beyond the usual death by crushing, electrocution, and general incompetence in the american workforce
I work in a private clinic in rural America as a physical therapist. Dealing with Covid out here is a fucking joke.
a) No one gives a shit about masks. People wear them with gaps around the nose, or with their noses hanging out. Others lift the masks to breathe when working out. Some patients just don’t wear them. No one calls them on it. This applies to clinical staff as well. I have one fellow clinician who got covid and now downplays it to every patient which reinforces the pattern. Several of my fellow clinicians work out indoors over lunch with no masks on in a small, hot room. They just fucking breathe all over eachother doing HIIT workouts off youtube.
We're also under high pressure to keep patient volume high, so even if my co-workers did take mask use seriously, no one wants to offend anyone's sensibilities and lose a revenue source.
B) This brings me to my next point. People here are sick as hell. I manage one woman with atrial fibrillation and pulmonary arterial hypertension. A couple have congestive heart failure. At least 3-4 patients on my caseload are on >2L oxygen constantly. These patients are extremely high risk and the gym space is small and crowded. It's a petri dish.
As an aside, old guys basically have a code that’s “I can’t hear you with that mask on” to get you to take yours off. Had one patient walk out of an evaluation for his balance after I refused to remove mine. He had fallen repeatedly, last time was white carrying 40 lbs of wood tripped and fell backwards slamming his head onto pavement. Go figure. I’m under constant pressure for billable units and my boss reamed me out for this.
C)No one disinfects fucking anything. I know surface transmission is rare, but come on.
D) I was exposed to covid and was ordered to come back into work after testing negative 2 days after exposure, which meant literally nothing, since that could well be in the incubation period and could have been a false negative.
Here’s the part where the “individual choice and responsibility” part comes in. I can’t get the fuck out of here. I had a non-compete sprung on me, for 2 years and 40 miles radius, 1 month after moving 2 states over to take this job. May I remind you I live in a small ass town. There ain’t shit around here for 40 miles. I’ll have to move again. Finally, it’s a right to work state, so if I complain or try to get people here to take this seriously, they can come up with any old BS reason to fire me, after which the non-compete renders me fucked. I’m trying to scheme my way out of here, but you just don’t have much power in the hiring market as a new graduate physical therapist.
To sum it up, coming to this clinic is mildly dangerous as a patient now, will be very dangerous if infection rates go back up, and if I say anything about it, I get evicted by default and have to move again.
Throughout Covid I’ve grown less and less trusting of “medical professionals.” Thanks for being one of the good ones. Even if some of your patients are dweebs, you’re doing the right thing comrade
I understand not trusting us. That said, I promise most of of us are just tying to do well by our patients.
In PT, if you’re like “nah bro, I don’t want to do 3x weekly for 6 weeks” then they can’t force you. Obviously you’d want to do that with a post-operative condition, but most diagnoses do great with like...maybe one more appointment the week of eval to make sure you’re on the right track, then tapering thereafter.
Send this in to Safety Third
(and OSHA, and the press)
Sending solidarity your way.
It’s actually what I wrote it for originally. Never got a response.
I mean...yes. Trust me, lots of times you can legitimately justify keeping a patient longer if your next appointment cancels, or using NMES or a vasoconstrictive device + ice for good reasons, but there’s lots of grey area and even out right instances of “this insurance still pays for the ol squeeze n freeze so make sure they get it.”
Also, I like the healthcare posting series you do. Keep it up
IANAL but in my understanding most non-compete contracts are not inforcible. But you still might have to go to court and hire a lawyer if they actually bother to sue you
This. Also double check your states rulings on non-competes. Some courts are hostile to them because they restrict the labor market. 40 miles and two years is extremely harsh. If you have to leave the state to find work the state might side with you.
to pile into this, I know one of the triggers of an unenforceable non compete is if they do not give you something in exchange, like a specific payment in the contract.
"continued employment" doesn't count for this, even in shitty southern red states.
like I said, that doesn't hold up in court. this is because a continued employment relationship on terms previously agreed to does not meet the legal definition of "consideration", making the contract invalid. this also applies to NDAs.
**edit: I think it has something to do with how basically if you broke the agreement, there is nothing for them to recoup. an enforceable non compete would require some additional payment or benefit that they could sue to recover.
granted, employers do this shit (coerce employees to sign contracts that are unenforceable) all the time, but they literally can't do shit about it. it's a scare tactic and one that has no downside for them, except maybe paying court costs if they are dumb enough to take you to court for violating an unenforceable contract. this, to me, is the real value of organized labor is being able to have access to a labor attorney to for consultation.
This is all well and good but I just got my a job in a non-profit university health system and am skating the fuck outta here, bitchesss
I know a local doctor who quit working at a hospice care facility when it got turned into overflow COVID quarantine with the "renovations" not seeming to include upgrades to the ventilation system to keep from spreading things from room to room through the A/C ducts.
Last I heard he's decided to just hunker down and plant crops in his back yard with his wife and kid.
