Mission Hospital concerns appear on Facebook after NPR-story

Following yesterday’s NPR story “Hospital To Nurses: Your Injuries Are Not Our Problem” by Daniel Zwerdling — which dealt with a case at Mission Health Systems — a comment thread has sprung up on the Facebook “Buncombe Politics” page. The NPR story reported:

The case of Terry Cawthorn and Mission Hospital, in Asheville, N.C., gives a glimpse of how some hospital officials around the country have shrugged off an epidemic.

Cawthorn was a nurse at Mission for more than 20 years. Her supervisor testified under oath that she was “one of my most reliable employees.”

Then, as with other nurses described this month in the NPR investigative series Injured Nurses, a back injury derailed Cawthorn’s career. Nursing employees suffer more debilitating back and other body injuries than almost any other occupation, and most of those injuries are caused by lifting and moving patients.

But in Cawthorn’s case, administrators at Mission Hospital refused to acknowledge her injuries were caused on the job. In fact, court records, internal hospital documents and interviews with former hospital medical staff suggest that hospital officials often refused to acknowledge that the everyday work of nursing employees frequently injures them. And Mission is not unique. NPR found similar attitudes toward nurses in hospitals around the country.

Matthew Hoagland started the Facebook thread by saying, “Anyone hear this story on the radio earlier today about Mission Hospital? There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes over there than just mistreated ex employees.”

As might be expected, a fair number of disgruntled comments have ensued.

And Asheville Citizen-Times reporter Mark Barrett pointed out that his paper,

had several stories about Mission and workmans comp issues 2009-2011, including seven that mention Terry Cawthorn. Here are the first three paragraphs of one of the first stories, from October 2009: “State officials have repeatedly criticized Mission Hospital for its handling of workers’ compensation claims, documents show, and a recent case may result in an investigation. A N.C. Industrial Commission deputy commissioner wrote in a Sept. 22 decision awarding benefits to a 20-year employee with back problems that Mission has a lengthy history of “unreasonable denial of claims.” Deputy Commissioner George Glenn II also wrote that the hospital had “a pattern and practice of bad-faith handling of workers’ compensation claims.”