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LETTER TO ED HOWELL ON THE MEDICAL CENTER OCCURRENCE POLICY

Posted: Friday March 24, 2006

February 6, 2006

Mr. R. E. Howell
UVA Medical Center
P.O. Box 800809
Charlottesville, VA 22908-0809

Dear Mr. Howell:

I write in reference to the new “occurrence” policy recently implemented at the hospital. Employees are extremely upset about it, which you may or may not have been aware of. The policy is the most archaic, restrictive, harsh policy I have ever come across. I wonder whoever came up with this policy, do they have to work under these new rules also? Will the hospital HR managers and some administrators be forced to work under these conditions?

I thought I’d take the policy as it is written, although I am now told each policy is different depending on the department. This particular one is from————. I don’t quite understand why the policy isn’t consistent across the entire hospital. Why it is up to the management in each department to decide how many weeks notice etc. an employee has to give? How will HR keep track of a hundred different policies for thousands of workers? I wonder if the academic side employees have this to look forward to under the two-tier system coming in July.

Scheduled Absences
Advance Notice: Staff employees must provide at least 4 week(s) notice of a pre planned vacation, holiday, personal day requests and at least 7 day(s) notice of a medical or dental appointment or an UNFORESEEABLE time off request.

Question- *how can a person give 7 days notice if it is “unforeseeable*”? Let’s say a filling comes out of a tooth. Is the employee to wait 7 days (to give PROPER notice) until they can get to a dentist? Or else get an occurrence? The supervisor, or designee, will approve scheduled absence requests within 5 days business days/weeks of submission of the request. And then, since the supervisor has 5 days to approve/disapprove the request, the employee really doesn’t know when or IF they will be going to the dentist. And what if it is DISapproved? Start the 7-day cycle all over again? Meantime, the tooth goes unfilled or gets it taken care of and the employee gets an occurrence anyway even with a note from the dentist. Not every employee can plan a month in advance for a personal day- i.e. a court appearance, a parent/teacher conference.
Late personnel requests (less than 7 days), may be granted but are dependent on the operational considerations (i.e patient schedule, staffing).

Would this be for emergencies such as the one described above?

Unscheduled Absences
Employees who fail to report for or remain at work as scheduled without advance supervisory approval, but with proper notification of the supervisor or designee, will incur an absence occurrence.

Please explain how this works if:
·There is an unexpected death in the family
·A sick child who cannot be taken to daycare/babysitter
·A sick employee
·A sick spouse or other family member (i.e elderly parent)
·An accident

This policy provides nothing for employees with a family and is much more difficult for a single parent family. You cannot give 7 days notice if your child gets sick or if you or your significant other gets sick or otherwise incapacitated. What if your vehicle breaks down and you have no way to get to work? Or many other things that came come up, emergencies. You are literally asking for your employees to pick between their jobs and their families. I also understand that people are getting occurrences WITH A DOCTOR’S EXCUSE. How does that work? Do you really want someone with strep throat working in the NICU? What if a single mother has a chronically ill child? Should they give up their job (or get fired) and collect welfare because of UVA’s occurrence policy? I don’t think the FMLA law was designed to be used for short illnesses such as flu, colds etc. What I don’t understand is if an employee does get sick or their child gets sick, what are they supposed to do?

Unscheduled absences of more than 30 minutes, but less than half of the employee’s scheduled shift will count as a half (1/2) of an occurrence.

So an employee might as well take off 3 ½ hours versus 31 minutes since they get an occurrence anyway?

Proper Notification: Staff employees will call in via telephone at least 2 hour(s) before the start of the schedules shift. When calling in, employees must talk directly to the supervisor or designee. Leaving a voicemail message with the supervisor or designee, is not considered proper notification.

If the employee’s shift begins at 7am, then are they to call their supervisor AT HOME at or before 5am? I can’t imagine that every employee at the hospital has his or her supervisor’s home phone number handy.

Attendance Standard
No more than four (4) occurrences within a rolling twelve month calendar year.

Folks are very upset about this part of the policy. In the past, they were allowed seven occurrences in a year. This was more acceptable to the employees than the new standard of four occurrences. What precipitated this change? Not enough people getting fired? I guess you figured if you lowered the bar, you could get rid of more people. Then next year it will be down to two, then none. So (eventually) an employee misses one day they are fired.

Tardy
Employees who report to work and are not at the work area and ready to work at the start of the scheduled shift will be considered tardy. There is no “grace period” of time.

·So if the bus from Scott Stadium is late-no fault of the employee-they get an occurrence?
·If there is an accident on 29 or 64-no fault of the employee-they get an occurrence?
·School closes due to whatever reason-if the employee has to leave to pick up their child they get one half an occurrence?
·If there is bad weather and an employee has to take their child to a babysitter (since school is closed) and they are late they get an occurrence?
·Sick child but the employee found someone to care for him or her so they can go to work-but late-they get an occurrence?
Since they will get an occurrence anyway, why would they show up at all? Either late or take off the day without advance notice they get an occurrence. Or their car won’t start or a million other things that can happen on a workday morning. And not everyone has a cell phone in case they would encounter a problem on the road.

I do understand the need for an attendance policy of course, but this one seems unduly harsh. Many of the employees believe it was designed to get rid of long-term employees so the medical center can hire new, younger, and cheaper workers-the 2nd tier workers.

I have also been told that employees know nothing about their particular policy in their department. They know the occurrence policy was changed but they don’t know to what. They don’t know what the rules are. So how can they follow the policy if they don’t know what it is? I also do not see anywhere that this occurrence policy is grievable. Is it?

I urge you to look in to this policy. There must be a few times a year-given to each employee-when they will not be charged an occurrence say for a sick child, if they themselves are sick, or if an elderly parent needs help. This policy is too restrictive for this community of workers. The morale at the hospital is at an all time low, which in turn means the patients aren’t as well cared for as they would be by happy, productive employees.

Jan Cornell
President

Cc: Leonard Sandridge

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LETTER TO ED HOWELL ON THE MEDICAL CENTER OCCURRENCE POLICY

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