“Don’t pay any attention to that lady,” I said. “You will be just fine.”
There was not much I could do about the situation, and I hoped the problem would go away.
It surprised me when Mr. Gilreath walked into my office one afternoon to discuss Raj with me. The supervisor had reported to the chief pathologist about Raj not feeling comfortable with drawing blood from children.
“Perhaps this program is too much on Raj,” Mr. Gilreath said.
“Raj is a very smart girl,” I responded. “She completed her master’s in zoology with honors. Perhaps she just needs to keep drawing blood, and she will get used to it.”
“Okay, that’s fine,” Mr. Gilreath said, noting my determination for Raj to keep the internship.
The first week of October, I was driving Raj to work at 6:15 a.m., Subhash sat in his chair in the back seat, and Raj sat quietly, wearing the white dress which was her lab uniform, her long hair wrapped in a bun. As I stopped at a stop sign, all of a sudden, a car hit us from behind, causing us to jerk forward. I was holding onto the steering wheel, but Raj didn’t have anything to hang onto, and the impact shook her head so hard that her bun came out and her hair flew forward across her face. She started crying, and we both turned around to make sure Sub-hash was okay. He was crying too, and at that moment, Raj said, “I’m done with the internship!”
Once the police came, wrote a report, and ticketed the person who hit us, we were so shook up that I simply turned the car around and headed back to the apartment. On the way, I tried to change her mind, saying, “It’s your decision, but it will be good if you can continue this. You will have a degree from this country, and if need be, later you will be able to get a good job easily in a hospital. It’s a decent job to work in a hospital lab.”
“No, I’m done with it, Kris,” she said in a firm tone. “I’m done. I’m frustrated with that supervisor and her constant taunting. And most of all, I am not happy leaving Subhash at Toddler’s Inn. He is only a year old, and I don’t like to see him cry when we leave him there.”
I told her that if she didn’t want to do it, that was fine with me. Later, I informed Mr. Gilreath, and he seemed relieved the situation worked out in the end.
In May 1971, a new facility named Providence Hospital opened in Cincinnati, replacing St. Mary’s Hospital which was ninety years old. The sisters (nuns) who started the planning of Providence had hired a consultant, Gordon A. Friesen, from Washington, DC, to design Providence Hospital based on new concepts he developed. Since there were only a small handful of hospitals across the country built on his concepts, it became well-known that Providence was built upon the Friesen concept. However, within ten months, Providence had lost one million dollars. Seeing that St. Elizabeth Hospital was making good money under the leadership of Mr. Gilreath, in March 1972, the chairman at Providence approached the board at St. Elizabeth to request the expertise of Mr. Gilreath for six months. The board agreed and assigned Mr. Gilreath to oversee the operations at Providence Hospital as well.
Within one week, Mr. Gilreath fired the administrator of Providence Hospital and began managing that facility. It was exciting for the administrative staff at St. Elizabeth, especially when Mr. Gilreath asked any of them to come with him to Providence so they could observe and become familiar with its setup. A few times, he asked Bill Poll, his assistant administrator, to come with him. If any of the administrative staff were asked to go to Providence, it was like a feather in their cap because it meant they were considered experts. Each time Bill Poll went with Mr. Gilreath, I felt disappointed. The whole time I hoped Mr. Gilreath would ask me.
Then, one day in April 1972, Mr. Gilreath asked me to accompany him to Providence Hospital. He had encountered several problems in the support service departments, especially with the Supply Processing and Distribution (SPD) Department.
“Kris, your expertise would be great in this area,” Mr. Gilreath told me. “I would like you to observe the operations in the support departments, especially the SPD, and then, I would be glad to hear your recommendations.”
I felt excited to be considered an expert in the eyes of the Providence Hospital staff, even though I knew nothing about the Friesen concept. The first step I took was to read Friesen’s manual and familiarize myself with the hospital’s design.
The Friesen design, a modern concept, meant that all the handling and delivery of supplies was automated. The carts moved on a monorail system which functioned by turning knobs to set what floor the cart should go to. Also, there were no nurses’ stations. On the patient floors, the nurses would do charting in the rooms, and they also used a cabinet, called a “nurse server,” built into a wall of each patient’s room. The cabinets could be opened from the hallway as well as from inside the room. The patient’s chart was kept in the middle part of the nurse server. The upper part of the nurse server contained clean supplies while the lower part contained the soiled linens that the housekeeping department could pick up from the hallway, consequently reducing the traffic going into the patient room. At least, this is how it was supposed to work. But the more time I spent observing operations at the hospital, the
