Salick Cried Wolf on OR Contamination

As a Westlake Village resident and health-care recruiter who works almost exclusively with hospital CEOs and physicians with no business ties to any Columbia hospitals, I am greatly appalled by the many victim-mentality accusations by Salick Health Care against Columbia and its CEO, Ron Phelps. Although the Westlake Medical Center sale was a win-win deal to both parties, Salick initiating yet another press conference to make an issue of Columbia employees “contaminating the OR while removing their supplies” has incited me to break my silent disgust. There was no real foul and it deeply embarrasses me to have such schoolyard tattling in my hometown. This event reminds me of the college professor chasing his colleague down the hall screaming about horrific injustices for failing to wipe the blackboard clean.

On a gravely serious note, one has to wonder how Dr. Salick, a physician in a position of medical leadership, can blatantly over-dramatize an expedient moving day just prior to close of escrow. Surely he must know that an operating room not only must be thoroughly decontaminated every 24 hours but also after each and every surgical case. Salick officials make it sound like the “trashing” occurred in the height of the day, when in fact it was a few hours before midnight to avoid compromising patient care. Certainly when the clock struck 12:01 a.m., when Salick’s license was at stake, one of the very first orders of business should have been to conduct an immediate intensive decontamination. It sounds like poor planning on Salick’s part if they were not on the ball with a midnight crew, especially since moving day is never clean. It’s both alarming and ludicrous that Salick would go public with such misleading and inflammatory wolf crying.

DIANA LONCAR

Westlake Village