Carolinas Healthcare System states "No Legal Right"

In my seven years of satisfactory and exemplary service at Carolinas Healthcare System,  I remember:

• Working full eight hour days on Thanksgiving Thursdays to provide residents/patients with recreational therapy (i.e. hair services.)
• Making residents look nice because their great-grandson was bringing an important young lady to meet her, and she wanted to look nice for the new potential bride.
• Having residents/patients touch my arm at completion of hair services just to say "thank you" because they had not been able to get their hair shampooed for weeks or even a month because of prior long hospital stays and surgeries that restricted their range of motion.
• Having to use my Carolinas Healthcare System's dementia training to coach Alzheimer's patients into allowing me to perform their hair services because their loved ones wanted their hair maintained.
• Listening for changes in the residents' breathing patterns or their overall mental and emotional health.
• Teaming with the nursing staff, the physical therapy staff, the occupational staff to coordinate hair appointments around therapies, doctor's appointments, eating times, and field trips.
• Teaming with the cleaning staff when patients got sick and the floor needed special clean-up procedures and disinfecting.
• Effectively communicating with social workers to ensure that they were providing family members with accurate hair service updates.
• Attending facility forums and staff meetings.

This nine bullet point list is just a small portion of my contributions to Carolinas Healthcare System in my seven years of service.

In my latter years of CHS service, I was discriminated against, retaliated against, refused job interviews by direct upline management, refused grievance resolution by human resources, and then offered a "Separation Agreement and Release" by a CHS Senior management official who had never even met me.

Carolinas Healthcare System is very impersonal.  They have become performance driven for their top level management only.  In my latter years with them, they consistently hired people into management positions without "healthcare industry experience."  I saw it with my own eyes.  These "new hires" were not even smart enough to limit their conversation surrounding their new positions in which they were not the best qualified candidate. But no one can complain without being subjected to a hostile work environment.

Is Carolinas Healthcare System a "great place to work?"  It depends on if you are a senior executive or if you were hired with preferential treatment.

For example, according to an interview between the Charlotte Observer newspaper and CHS, CHS states that only senior executives may use the CHS aircrafts for personal use.

This practice is discriminatory in my opinion, because when people are being admitted to CHS facilities for "care without compromise" - the senior executives are NOT typically the ones concerned with patient's immediate health.  In addition, I have not seen a CHS Senior executive do half the manual labor that I did while being employed at CHS.

I also remind you that Charlotte Mecklenburg Hospital Authority d/b/a Carolinas Healthcare System is a public, multi-billion dollar "non-profit" organization, and as a former CHS employee who was laid off, I have repeatedly asked CHS to be

• courteous
• compassionate about my emotional distress and mental anguish that I suffered from their recent management changes
• caring about my seven years of committment to their organization
• customer service driven as I was an internal CHS customer who has complained going on four years about CHS injustices.

Yet, CHS states that I have "NO LEGAL RIGHT TO any form of severance payment."

So to anyone considering working for Carolinas Healthcare System, there is no guarantee that you are going to get fair treatment, but you may at least get some employee perks like this "CHS retractable lawn chair."

 To the "front line" CHS employees that are hands-on with the patients, I salute you.  God will definitely reward you even if CHS does not.