Official Who Helped Cure Hospital’s Ills Resigns

When William Fujioka arrived on the scene at High Desert Hospital a year ago, he went to work applying emergency management triage to a badly injured county facility.

The only public hospital in the Antelope Valley was in disarray, according to a Los Angeles County Department of Health Services audit. Medicine had been wrongly prescribed to a patient. Workers mishandled radioactive materials and improperly spent dead patients’ money. Employee confidence and morale had hit rock bottom. Last spring, health officials fired the hospital administrator for mismanagement.

Into this fray stepped Fujioka, an energetic, can-do, 18-year county health department veteran who had previously worked as an assistant hospital administrator and as a personnel manager. He modestly summed up his philosophy:

“A good administrator never goes out front,” Fujioka said. “It’s the nurses, the doctors, the clerks, all the staff and caregivers who are . . . the backbone of the hospital. I’m just here helping out.”

His common-sense style and open-door policy are credited with bringing employees together and revitalizing the 170-bed hospital, according to employee leaders and county health department officials.

However, Fujioka’s tenure as chief of High Desert was short-lived. He resigned effective Friday after eight months, not because the pressure was too much, but because he missed his wife and two children, he said. He will return to the county’s personnel department.

His job, which consisted of days that stretched from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., forced the 43-year-old to live in Lancaster during the week, and he would return home to Whittier on weekends.

“I have a wife, a 4-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son that I miss very much,” he said. “The sole reason for me leaving is the impact the job had on my family.”

His departure comes after he supervised the correction of a long list of management problems identified in the audit: from updating personnel files and making sure workers submitted accurate time sheets, to disciplining employees who did not follow regulations, such as misusing county-owned cars.

County officials said they will name an interim replacement. Two candidates are under consideration for the permanent post, but officials declined to identify them.

The hospital’s current associate administrator, Jerry Harris, will be removed from his post after a permanent administrator is named, said Walter Gray, an assistant health department administrator. Harris’ removal was recommended in the county audit of High Desert.

“We can’t really get rid of the No. 2 when we don’t have a No. 1,” said Gray.

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Fujioka took over High Desert just as the full weight of the county’s budget crisis became apparent to top county officials. It appeared that at least one of the six county hospitals would have to be closed to help bridge the budget gap.

High Desert was at the top of the closure list, saved only after President Clinton promised $364 million in aid to the county health department. Some employees, however, believe that Fujioka’s quick work to help turn the facility around contributed to its survival.

“Bill is kind of a rare person, and the best kind of manager,” said Gray, himself a former administrator at High Desert. “He went in there in a tough situation and kept people together. I can’t say enough about the job he did.”

In the beginning, Fujioka appeared doomed to go down in ignominy at High Desert like his two predecessors. In a survey, employees ranked the hospital management last on a list of the hospital’s strengths.

“We weren’t really sure what was going on when [Fujioka] first came here, although we knew he was sent here to clean things up,” said Sarah Speck, a medical records supervisor and shop steward for Service Employees International Union Local 660, which represents many of the hospital’s employees. “We were waiting to see if he was really going to handle the problems.”

Other employees privately called Fujioka “The Terminator,” because of the widespread belief that he would preside over the hospital’s closure.

“When he came, it was pretty much the staff against the administration,” said Candy Smith, the hospital’s budget officer.

His first encounters with staff were often unpleasant. “They were real angry,” Fujioka said. “At one of the early staff meetings, they said, ‘We know you were sent here to close the place,’ which wasn’t true. My intent was to bring the place together.”

Despite his assurances, much of the staff was unconvinced.

During Fujioka’s first month and a half on the job, someone placed screws in his car tires, flattening them on three separate occasions. Later, an anonymous caller unhappy with one of Fujioka’s decisions called Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s office and told an aide that Fujioka’s actions were “why some people get shot.”

Fujioka took it as a death threat, but tried not to let it affect his attitude.

“I made sure I was aware of my surroundings when I was in the hospital and walking to my car,” he said of the threat. “I didn’t want it to affect my performance.”

As months passed, it appeared that Fujioka was indeed bringing the staff together: The problem was that they were aligning themselves against him.

But he said he never thought of quitting.

“I wasn’t going to run,” he said. “I’m a fighter.”

Instead, Fujioka became more visible. He held weekly informational meetings for rank-and-file employees and managers. He invited the shop steward to attend managers’ meetings. He copied memos from his superiors and passed them out to supervisors, who in turn, distributed them to staff.

“They told me no one had done that before,” Fujioka said. “Doing all the copying, we almost killed the Xerox machine.”

Each week, Fujioka was required to submit a progress report to the Board of Supervisors. He also had to monitor the county’s rapidly deteriorating financial health so he could keep track of what might happen to his hospital.

In the middle of the budget crisis, an esprit de corps emerged from within the rank and file. Hospital staff members started showing up at board meetings in bright orange T-shirts, with “Save High Desert” emblazoned across the chest. Later, as the threat of closure bounced from one county hospital to another, other county employees took to wearing their own personalized, vividly hued T-shirts to board meetings.

“It looked like a rainbow in there,” Fujioka said.

Eventually, staff members began warming to him. They saw that Fujioka was fighting on their behalf, including the proposal to close the hospital. Later, during thousands of layoffs that took place last fall, Fujioka interceded to try to blunt the impact of dismissals and transfers at the hospital.

“I was going to be one of the ones laid off,” said Tana Damann, a pediatrics nurse who has worked at the hospital for 16 years. “I was very distraught. But every time I needed to see him, he didn’t turn me away.”

Fujioka’s work ethic was also a plus.

“One of the things people noticed was how hard he worked,” said Sandy Smith, the hospital’s director of volunteer services and community relations. “People would see him when they came in, and see him when they left.”

“If you ask the staff to work hard, they want to see the boss working hard,” Fujioka said.

But all the while, Fujioka was living in Lancaster at his in-laws’ house from Sunday night to Friday evening to avoid what he described as a 90-mile drive from Whittier.

“I thoroughly enjoy what I’m doing during the day,” he said. “When I’m here, I love this job. But at night, I miss my kids, I miss my wife, because no matter how tough your job is, you come home and things are good.”