I just accepted a job offer from XX hospital. It was a pay cut compared to my current job in the private sector, but somehow I was inclined to accept the job offer. I have been out of the healthcare sector for 4 years and I think it's time for me to come back. When comparing between the private and healthcare sector, I think I felt a difference. I don't know if it is the people there. They seem to me to be devoid of emotions. I don't feel the passion and drive to work. Things are rushed, a lot of last minutes stints just to be able to satisfy the customer and company timelines. I think it's my sense of responsibility for what I do, I work late hours to rush out stuff that are handled by me just to meet the last minute timelines, but more than once, people in the workflow chain just doesn't comply. You can end up rushing out the work on a late night and over the weekends but they just ended up in a bottleneck due to someone holding it up before it reaches the end of the workflow. Sometimes, things just ended going back and fro just because someone who reviews your work is not satisfied with how you write the report. These changes can be as minor as rephrasing the entire sentence although it means exactly the same thing. This is not an english class, shouldn't the focus be on the content of the report?
What makes things worse is having a boss who only knows how to exert her authority but doesn't communicate the right information down. A lot of times we end up rushing work due to her crazy timelines and the fact that the email information has been lying in her email inbox for one month "untouched". We have been getting news of the department we have been working with through our co workers instead of our boss herself. She never understood the time and effort we all put in for the work due to limited manpower on our side. That is because we still managed to cover our work in the end. She can leave urgent matters hanging just to leave work on time. There was no form of appreciation for the effort we put in to complete the tasks. Because of all these issues, people in our team are slowly leaving and transferring out of the department. I would say I have been able to stay on till now despite all the complex issues because I have a fantastic team of colleagues working with me. We were able to keep the team together despite the fact that during the first one and a half years we had no one to report to who can make decisions for the team. When our boss came in last year, matters just got worse instead of better. It makes me really sad to see our team disintegrate due to her, with people leaving the team because they feel that they can't work with her.
I hope I made the right decision moving on, because I don't anticipate being able to stay in my current job long term. The manager who interviewed me for this new job seems sincere in having me join them. He shared with me his passion for the job and how excited he was with the upcoming new hospital plan. It was then I reminisce the days I spent in healthcare, when the days I actually put in long hours was to test urgent samples for the benefit of a patient, not to meet the timeline for a report.
