Whidbey Watchdog

Good morning. It’s Saturday, and the sun is trying to peek through. It’s also a new dawn for our community hospital. In the last four days, WH has replaced its CEO of four years with its Chief Financial Officer, who has also held down that job here for about four years. When Ron came on board, I was attending every board meeting, watching him in action, and of course rendering advice to the Board and administrators, which went unheeded. I haven’t looked into his soul, but I have a feel for the kind of person he is. I have good news for readers. Ron has the exact opposite personality of our two prior CEOs. Tom Tomasino and Geri Forbes were dominating presences, who spent most of their time consolidating their power and control over the institution. They were control freaks, and they ruled over the place with an iron hand – that includes their relationship with the board of directors, who were only too eager to let them have their way in almost everything. They tried to intimid...

Our hospital in not accredited. I’m not aware of any other of Washington’s 109 hospitals that lacks accreditation. Even if there are some, it’s not more than a handful. If this doesn’t raise a red flag for any prospective WhidbeyHealth patient, maybe it should. Accreditation, in hospital terms, means one of two independent agencies has inspected a hospital, found its facilities to be in order, and that a whole bunch of its specified policies, procedures, and practices meet certain standards. An inspection team spends about a week at a given hospital, combing through the books, examining the facilities, observing daily operations, etc.  They are there to help, not to hinder or punish. If deficiencies are found, the hospital (not the public) is notified of them, and they must be corrected before accreditation is granted. Once granted, I believe a less in-depth inspection is performed annually, before the accreditation status is renewed. Our hospital was accredited u...

Appearances can be deceiving, and at Whidbey General/Health over the four years of the Geri Forbes reign what we saw was not what we got. Before and after the transition from CEO Tom Tomasino to Geri Forbes, I was extremely active in trying to ferret out what was really going on at our hospital. During a two-year stretch of activism, I submitted over 60 public records requests, and I obtained probably 500 pages of documents. Using those documents as a basis, I published on a website like this one 45 investigative reports. I relay this so those who read postings on this site will have confidence that I’m well versed in the history of our beloved hospital. If I rant at times, I do so only after I have first done painstaking research. For the final five years of Tomasino’s time as CEO, the hospital’s financial ledger ended up in red ink at the end of each fiscal year. While there were lots of reasons to replace him, it was the finances that finally caused the board of di...