Mississippi pro-choice activist fired on International Women’s Day

Catholic Charities fired a Mississippi employee on International Women’s Day for discussing her former pro-choice advocacy work in a recent magazine article.

Lori Gregory is the former program director of Hope Haven, a children’s crisis mental health facility in Jackson, Mississippi. Hope Haven provides free counseling for at-risk adolescents without private insurance, many of whom are in foster care. Gregory had worked for Catholic Charities since 2002, beginning as a volunteer and working her way up to program director. She was fired unexpectedly Wednesday morning during a meeting with the local bishop, in reaction to a feature article in Find It Fondren’s recent women’s issue.

Entitled Stand Up, Be Heard, the article lauded Gregory’s social-advocacy work, her old op-ed columns (penned under a pseudonym), and her outspoken opposition to Missississippi’s 2011 anti-abortion legislation Proposition 26, which, the article claimed, “threaten[ed] … Gregory’s beliefs”. The article then commended her volunteer work at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a local abortion clinic.

Her employers at the Catholic diocese cited the article as a violation of the church’s code of ethics in a termination letter that they presented her during this morning’s meeting.

“If I’ve got to go down, I’d rather go down for something I really, really believe in,” Gregory said. “Now the International Women’s Day thing is just the Band-Aid of irony on it.”

Gregory had been warned about making pro-choice statements before. In 2013, she wrote an op-ed article for Slate about her work at the Jackson Women’s Health Center. Her employers reprimanded her for the article and made her promise to stop speaking out in favor of abortion rights and to end her volunteer work at the abortion clinic. These terms were presented as mandatory conditions of employment.

Gregory agreed to stop. “It broke my heart. It was one of my most favorite things to do,” she said. “I spent two years of my life intensively involved in social justice work with women here … And it was a great joy of mine but I also knew that I needed to have a job.

“And at the time, I was having some health issues. I needed to have insurance. All the regular stuff that you need as an American. I was not in a position to give up my employment so I elected to no longer write or do the justice work or do my job. And I was very sad about it for a long time. Which is why this time, I’m not going to be quiet.” Gregory also said Hope Haven was the only provider in Mississippi that offered crisis services to kids without private insurance.

The article in Find it Fondren’s says that Gregory still escorts women at the abortion clinic, but she says she stopped volunteering after her talk with her bosses in 2013, which Gregory thinks was a misunderstanding with the journalist. She believes it’s unfair that an article mentioning her previous pro-choice advocacy work could be grounds for termination.

Maureen Smith, the communications director for the Catholic diocese of Jackson, would not comment specifically on Gregory’s termination. But she said employees of the Catholic Church were expected to follow the church’s core teachings.

“As a church, we are a pro-life entity. When you work for the Catholic Church, you work for the church in all aspects. There is a pro-life ethic in everything we do. I don’t know how you can work for the Catholic Church and be a part of a pro-life ethic and be in conflict with it at the same time,” Smith said. “Why would you do that? If I was walking around saying things against church teachings, that’s hypocritical and that’s problematic.”

Robert Tuttle, a law professor at George Washington University, said federal anti-discrimination law allowed religious organizations to discriminate on the basis of religion. “Courts have had some doubts and questions about what it means to discriminate on the basis of religion, but one of the things they have done is defer strongly to the core doctrines and beliefs of the organization, and if someone is not in compliance with them, then they may be terminated,” he said.

Gregory is a single mother with a seven-year-old daughter. She’s not worried about telling her daughter about her firing.

“I think that I will just tell her that I lost my job because I believed in something,” Gregory said. “And there are a few things that I know that she believes in real strongly as well. First one is that girls are awesome. And I think that if she knows that about me, then that’s a good thing. But I also had a mother that walked out of a job in the 70s due to a pay-gap issue. So I had a good model.”

The Catholic diocese confirmed that Hope Haven would continue to operate.

Mississippi pro-choice activist fired on International Women’s Day

In NHS management being fired means you continue working for more money

When I had to leave my role as a senior NHS manager, I discovered that the health service has a well-used but little-known system for easing people out of top jobs. And I learned that it doesn’t work well for anyone: trusts, our healthcare system, managers, patients or the taxpayer.

It’s quite common for senior leaders to have to step down, even when there are no performance issues and their actions haven’t risked patient safety. Sometimes, as in any sector, people simply end up in jobs that aren’t right for them. And just as often, managers, keen to support NHS bodies through difficult change projects, take on tasks that prove impossible to accomplish.

My case is typical. Individual hospitals are being pushed to group together in larger organisations, centralising specialist care and closing some common services with overlapping coverage. And the timetables for these ambitious reforms are sometimes built around political cycles, rather than good medical care or change management. I ended up overseeing a major change programme – but the deadline was unrealistic, and staff shortages were so acute that we couldn’t recruit enough experienced medics. After a period we got things under control; but senior management made clear that they wanted a change of leadership, believing that it would draw a line in the sand and signal a fresh start.

In the private sector, I’d have been given a fat pay-off and sent on my way. But in UK public healthcare it’s not acceptable to spend taxpayers’ money that way, and departing managers have nowhere else to go: the NHS is the only game in town. So I was summoned to a meeting, and offered a sideways move into a national role at NHS Improvement: the agency responsible for improving practice across the health service.

I soon learned that most such roles at NHS Improvement are one-year contracts, where people do useful work that is rarely followed through into delivery. Working there, some people apply for other NHS jobs and eventually move into senior roles elsewhere in the system. But many, wounded by their treatment and unsure of their chances in the job market, instead use the role as a springboard into interim work; and the NHS is desperately short of skilled, experienced leaders, so it ends up paying them £1,000 a day to plug gaps in its management structures.

Many people offered a one-year job at NHS Improvement would instead be willing to take a less senior job with their current employer, if it meant a permanent job and the chance to stay in the locality. But few are offered this option, and there’s a stigma attached to dropping grades. It’s seen as a sign of personal failure, and there’s an expectation that careers only ever go upwards – which, in these days of long careers and merging organisations, isn’t realistic.

Political leaders and senior management need to recognise that, while not all appointments work out, these people still have skills the NHS needs. And they should understand that failing in an impossible job is a verdict on the job, not the person. After all, those jobs only become impossible because managers are trying to both keep their staff happy, and push through the systemic changes required by national policymakers. The NHS needs to reform, and ministers have a democratic mandate to reshape the system; but currently, the best way to protect your career is to keep your head down, build support among your staff, and resist risky reforms.

With budgets in decline, demand rising, a growing recruitment crisis, and an endless series of new policies and organisational changes, it’s easy for organisations to become over-stretched and leaders to fall out of favour. If the NHS wants people to be ambitious in these very difficult jobs, it shouldn’t push those who run into trouble into temporary non-jobs – and then into an interims market where the NHS must rent their skills back at exorbitant cost.

National leaders need to be more open about the difficulty of succeeding in these hugely challenging jobs, and do everything they can to retain good managers who’ve taken a step back – offering them permanent employment in less high-profile roles. Then people would be more willing to take on the most difficult jobs in NHS management, and there would be less gaps in management grades. That, in turn, would cut the interims bill and improve continuity in organisations that can ill afford excessive staff costs and unstable leadership.

The current system evolved to help protect NHS staff while facilitating necessary leadership changes, but it’s a huge waste of talent as well as money. Politicians and the Department of Health need to be more open, both about the flaws in redeployment processes, and about the pressures that brought us to this point. That would take courage; but if they’re ready to have that conversation, the benefits will be felt by patients and taxpayers as well as NHS managers and policymakers.

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In NHS management being fired means you continue working for more money

Overlook Obamacare, Here"s four Healthcare Trends You Should Be Fired up About

With the rollout of Obamacare, the nationwide focus of healthcare technological innovation has unfortunately revolved all around the implementation issues of the federal health insurance coverage web site.  This narrow interest ignores some of the more thrilling developments in this quickly changing sector.  To help us get a glimpse into the long term, I reached out to Reggie Luedtke, Co-Founder of BlueTree Network and Branch2, businesses that specialize in exploring the following generation of healthcare information engineering.  Luedtke presented these four trends he predicts we’ll see above the up coming few years.

1. Higher industrial transparency will lead to much better outcomes and reduce expenses.  Shopping for healthcare is a process many shoppers dread.  Accessibility to large quality data to make informed selections is regrettably still in its infancy.  Transparency in the regions of cost, top quality of care, and anticipated outcomes will let sufferers to grow to be informed shoppers and decide on the best selection for their healthcare requirements.  Some firms, such as Healthgrades, OkCopay, and Pokitdok, are presently starting up to provide these transparency remedies for folks.  The next iteration will probably consist of constructing systems that seamlessly give guidance based on a patient’s coverage, taking into account what the real out-of-pocket costs will be, such as co-pays, coinsurance, and deductibles.  Increased transparency also builds a aggressive landscape for healthcare companies, positioning people organizations with the ideal care at a sensible price tag to expand their practices.  Even if a hospital can supply a bulk of essential solutions, it doesn’t imply they are the best at all of them.  For this purpose, specialized care organizations that focus on a couple of distinct and connected treatments will emerge as viable options for consumers.  This new landscape will put customers in a position to share details with each other and take benefit of standardized pricing designs that will both increase outcomes and reduce the expense of care.

2. Wellness-monitoring apps will be linked to decrease premiums.  As the healthcare business shifts to a more proactive organization model, insurance organizations are finding far more innovative approaches to inspire and monitor the overall health of their members.  Customers who actively track their overall health and behaviors, utilizing tools like mobile apps, will eventually have reduce premiums.  In a lot the exact same way some automobile insurance businesses give you the choice to keep track of your car’s action and provide rebates for risk-free driving routines, wellness monitoring will aggressively move into the healthcare technological innovation area.  This trend is presently apparent as several wellness ideas routinely give reductions to members who go to the gym frequently.  These new wellness apps will give customers a mechanism to learn ways to improve their nutrition and workout routines.  Customers who adopt these habits will see reduce insurance coverage premiums, in addition to enhanced overall health.

Use of overall health monitoring units will lead to lower insurance premiums. (Photo credit score: juhansonin)

3. Well being techniques will embrace new technological innovation to enhance patient experiences.  Health techniques are beginning to investigate new technologies that let patients to be far more intimately involved in their personal healthcare selections.  They’re producing in-property innovation departments and partnering with third-get together organizations to define what a much more patient-centric model will search like.  Examples of innovators in this field incorporate: Cleveland Clinic, University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, Geisinger Overall health Program, and Kaiser Permanente.  Overall health systems that do not innovate will start to see patients moving towards much more open methods that prioritize patient satisfaction.

4. Application overall health portals for men and women will generate a more informed client.  Decades right after e-mail grew to become a single of the most frequent kinds of communication, most people still can not use this engineering to talk with their care suppliers.  This is modifying.  The up coming phase in the direction of empowering the patient is the development of overall health portals for men and women.  These portals will let patients to effortlessly connect with their companies as nicely as compile information from their health and fitness devices and apps.  After this information is integrated into the portal, companies this kind of as Narrative Science will be able to condense these complex overall health statistics into understandable test outcome summaries and individual progress notes.  Believe of this as an iTunes or Spotify for your overall health, exactly where previous behaviors can be used to suggest new healthful behaviors and fitness tracking apps.  The capability to entry an individual’s complete overall health and wellness information, mixed with intelligent information mining and behavior modification applications, will produce a much more educated buyer.

As Luedtke explains, “These trends should allow us to move from a model of care that relies on delayed reactions to changes in large populations, towards providing each interactive and proactive care at the personal degree.”  Now it is our flip as patients to make the most of these emerging tools and techniques.

Robert J. Szczerba is the CEO of X Tech Ventures and author of the Forbes column “Rocket Science Meets Brain Surgery.”  Adhere to him via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Overlook Obamacare, Here"s four Healthcare Trends You Should Be Fired up About