ThedaCare – Ascension Case Shows How NOT To Run A Company: ThedaCare Shoots Itself In Both Feet
In the state of Wisconsin, there are, among others, two large healthcare providers: ThedaCare and Ascension.
An employee of ThedaCare saw and applied for a job at Ascension. They told some of their colleagues at ThedaCare about the better pay and better hours being offered at Ascension. In total 7 ThedaCare employees applied to and were offered better jobs at Ascension. The seven asked ThedaCare to match the offer. ThedaCare declined. The seven, who are at will employees with no contractually obligated time to stay at ThedaCare, said OK, then we are going to take the jobs at Ascension. Here is where things get interesting: the week before they were scheduled to start their new jobs ThedaCare filed a lawsuit requesting an injunction to prevent the seven from starting their new jobs at Ascension. The judge on the case granted a temporary injunction because he was persuaded that the healthcare of the community might be at risk if the seven were allowed to change to Ascension. Such an argument might have some merit if these employees were all leaving the area. However, that is a somewhat dubious argument and a few days later the judge agreed and lifted the injunction. If you map the distance (which your humble author did) from the ThedaCare Regional Medical Center - Neenah to the Ascension St. Elizabeth Hospital it is a grand total of 6.3 miles, not sixty-three miles, six point three miles. So it seems to be more a matter of which facility patients would go to for care, not that the care would no longer be available in the community. Someone may argue that those additional few minutes to get to a Level II trauma center could be a life or death situation. That may be, but if keeping their Level II trauma center status was so important to ThedaCare, there was an easy solution: match the job offers. Ascension was somehow willing and able to offer better pay, etc. Why not ThedaCare? Besides, wherever a hospital is located the fact is that it will be closer to some folks than it is to other folks. Should we now sue every healthcare provider who does not establish and maintain a Level II trauma center within x number of minutes from our house?
Rather than being willing to recognize the realities of the covid, healthcare marketplace, and offer to increase their pay, ThedaCare instead decided to sue to force the employees to stay. Forgetting for a moment the shaky legal grounds of such an action, what kind of bad will do you think this created for ThedaCare, not only from the perspective of healthcare professionals considering where they would like to work, but also from prospective patients about where they would like to go for treatment? I think most folks would prefer to go to a healthcare facility where the employees feel well-treated and are presumably happier.
By refusing to match the offers from Ascention, ThedaCare was presumably trying to keep its costs, specifically employee pay, down. Ironically, ThedaCare’s actions may have created the exact opposite of what they presumably wanted. How many other healthcare professionals working at ThedaCare are now eyeing the exit? And how many healthcare professionals looking for employment may now think twice before accepting an offer from ThedaCare? Existing and potential future employees may start insisting on a “hazard pay” premium for working at a place where rightly or wrongly a perception has perhaps been created that the place does not treat their employees the best. Given the situation ThedaCare’s actions have created, how are they going to attract new employees to replace the seven that left without increasing the pay they offer? Before, ThedaCare only had to match the pay Ascension was offering, now to get any of the employees back they would have to beat, not just meet the higher pay and better working conditions that Ascension is providing.
In any event, about a week later the judge lifted the restraining order allowing the seven to start their new jobs. You’d think that would be the end of it but nope ThedaCare was not done shooting itself in the foot. Unfortunately, rather than seeing the error of their ways, and dropping things, ThedaCare is pursuing a lawsuit against Ascension accusing them in essence of “poaching” the other’s employees.
One of the things I advise my clients is that the first step in wealth protection is right living. The idea is that prevention is the best protection. If people have a favorable view of you, they are less likely to sue you. Because people are humans who occasionally make mistakes, malpractice lawsuits can happen anywhere. However, it appears ThedaCare paid a great deal of money to create a mountain of bad will for themselves. Whether their likelihood of being sued has increased and whether a jury would look more disfavorably on ThedaCare remains to be seen. From this vantage point however, it doesn’t look good. One can only wish them luck in their next malpractice case.