Health-care workers all over the nation are speaking to the news media and posting on social media in an effort to show the public how badly the coronavirus pandemic is straining lives and resources; a few are getting pushback from officials who don't like the optics.
Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican, "has complained to multiple hospital leaders about their employees — doctors and nurses — giving interviews with media outlets on the challenging conditions they face as the state continues to struggle with the Covid-19 pandemic, according to multiple sources with health care facilities and the governor’s office," Ben Felder reports for The Frontier.
On a call a few weeks ago, Stitt allegedly complained to Jim Gebhart, the president of Mercy Hospital in Oklahoma City, about news stories featuring doctors from the hospital. "On that call Stitt said if doctors didn’t stop “fearmongering” about capacity issues it could force him to impose a ban on elective surgeries, which would be a financial hardship for many hospitals," Felder reports. Stitt has made similar threats to other hospital leaders, according to an anonymous source in the governor's office.
Stitt spokesperson Charlie Hannema said the governor wasn't trying to strongarm hospitals into being quiet, but instead was frustrated because hospital employees were telling the news media different information than they were telling him. Stitt considered halting elective surgeries to increase capacity after learning from news reports how bad things are in hospitals, Hannema said, but won't pursue that because doctors have told him it's a bad idea. “There was never a threat of, ‘We’re going to knock out your elective surgeries to punish you for talking to the media’ or ‘for saying the situation is one way or another,'” Hannema said.
Meanwhile, emergency physician Dr. Cleavon Gilman was briefly fired from Yuma Regional Medical Center in Arizona after his tweets about the severity of the pandemic in Arizona, Jamie Landers reports for Arizona Republic. After Gilman was fired and tweeted about it, the hospital faced widespread blowback on social media, and insisted that there had been a communication error and that Gilman had not been fired. "News to me," Gilman tweeted.
from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2LFPMq7 Oklahoma governor threatened to cancel hospitals' elective procedures for talking to press about pandemic - Entrepreneur Generations
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