Bullied, Mobbed, & Injured at Work

I was employed for 30 years as a respiratory therapist at St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho. St. Alphonsus is a part of the Trinity Health care system headquartered in Novi, Michigan. In Jan. 2004, I became the target of a psychologically abusive co-worker, a workplace “bully” who tried to get me fired or force me to resign, apparently because she did not approve of my religious and political beliefs.

Her behavior consistently jeopardized patient care. By Dec, 2004 I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of the bullying. I reported the bullying and the danger to patient care to management many times without any relevant or responsible response. I also reported the diagnosis of PTSD to management numerous times. Again nothing was done. This was true in spite of the fact that the diagnosis of PTSD was made by a St. Alphonsus professional as occuring on the job at St. Alphonsus!

Management repsonded to my reports by claiming that the PTSD injury was “petty,” or “self-generated.” The employee relations manager threatened to fire me for reporting the PTSD to him and also, with the department manager and a vice-president ordered me to not talk about the abuse and injury to my co-workers.

This problem and the PTSD injury was also reported to the Trinity Health vice-president in charge of organizational integrity with no appropriate action, not even a response for months. In August of 2006 I resigned from Saint Alphonsus serioiusly injured and partially disabled by the abuse. However by that time I was already into several months of professional therapy including medication and that, along with leaving the extremely toxic work environment, plus an intensive self-effort to educate myself about psychological abuse in the workplace and PTSD, enabled me to gradually recover from the injury and continue working and functioning normally.

After leaving St. Alphonsus I did what any responsible citizen and health care professional would do. Out of concern for the safety of others I reported what happened to me and why I left to approximately 450 of my former co-workers there. In my report I specifically accused senior management at St. Alphonsus of behaving in a manner that was abusive and injury-causing to their employees.

Management at St. Alphonsus responded in a fury. They initiated a punitive psychiatric admission to their psychiatric hospital and had me locked up for six days. The psychiatrist who initiated the involuntary admission, without ever consulting psychologist, family doctor, family members, friends or co-workers, and also without evaluating me, claimed that I had multiple (8-10) serious psychiatric problems, even though I had no symptoms of most of those problems.

At that time I was primarily suffering from some anxiety. He claimed that I was psychologically disabled even though at the time indicated I was working in two medical centers, taking care of patients on life support, supervising other staff, and responding to cardiac and respiratory arrests, also playing basketball and running several times a week and interacting normally with family and friends.

A person who is psychologically disabled is not capable of getting out of bed in the morning and holding one job. Also the psychiatrist did not tell me nor any member of my family what those diagnoses were. We only found out for the first time five months later when my attorney got a copy of the medical record, which was clearly an intentionally falsified document.

Also the psychiatrist never offered me any treatment for those so-called “diagnoses” I had. As medical director of the psychiatric hospital he was an employee of senior management the same people I accused of abusing their employees, so he had a financial interest in depicting me as someone with psychiatric problems, in order to discredit my reports of people being knowingly abused and injured on the job at Saint Alphonsus.

Since then the Idaho Board of Medicine has used my involuntary admission as a reason to issue an Order and Stipulation against me requiring me to continue seeing a psychologist regularly and requiring her to make quarterly reports to the Board about my condition, even though my psychologist has told them that there is no reason for me to be seen. The Board also specifically rejected reports from people who know me other than my current psychologist, including family, friends, department manager and co-workers. Unfortunately the psychiatrist who initiated the punitive psychiatric admission was recently a member of the same board.

I’ve bounced back from my mistreatment at the hands of an abusive medical hierarchy in Boise which does not hesitate to misuse the power it has, as well as engage in clearly unethical behavior. Since then I’ve devoted a portion of my time, energy, and skills in telling others what happened to me, as well as continuing to address the problem to my former employer with still no responsible, ethical, or accountable response.

In treating me the way they did and refusing to respond to my reports, management at Saint Alphonsus and Trinity Health violated many of their own standards inculding Standards of Conduct, Customer Service Standards, and Basic Conditions of Employment. I’ve entered a couple articles on my blog at www.leonardnolt.blogspot.com about this ordeal and will be adding more.

 You can find those articles and more about my experience of being bullied, mobbed, and injured by placing the following into Google: ( “Saint Alphonsu Regional Medical Center” Leonard Nolt). Thank You. Leonard Nolt LeonardNolt@AOL.com

Tags: falsified medical records, involuntary psychiatric admission, workplace-bullying

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 10:42 am and is filed under Our stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.