In Sickness and in Health
Posted Mar 7, 2009 Employee Relations
∞ Friday’s hospital episode (as commented on via Twitter) put me in mind of some of the lectures I got during my tenure at a particularly policy-minded company.
While I was working there, I had to deal with a handful of medical emergencies that required an ambulance. Apparently, dialing 911 from a desk phone sets off all kinds of alarms at this company. There are also apparently several unwritten procedures about how to call emergency services. How they got past me, I don’t know, since I typically consider the employee handbook to be every worker’s BFF.
Oh. Right. They weren’t written.
In the first instance, an employee developed back spasms that, until the paramedics got there, looked for all the world like a seizure to everyone who witnessed it. Well, what do you do when you see someone having a seizure? You get him to a hospital post-haste, that’s what you do. I thought nothing of picking up my phone and calling 911.
Cue the phone calls.
HR: “Did you know someone dialed 911 from your desk phone?”
Me: “Yes, there was a medical emergency. It’s handled - I’m in the middle of writing up the incident form as we speak.”
IT: “We need to look at your phone. It apparently called 911.”
Me: “My phone was acting as my representative at that time.”
Security: “You’re not supposed to call 911. You’re supposed to call us and let us do it.”
Me: “Since it took you twenty minutes to get up here last time I called you, I figured I’d cut out the middleman.”
Facilities: “You have to be careful about abusing 911 because it costs us money.”
Me: “Okay. Next time an employee goes into convulsions I’ll save us the 911 bill so we can pay the lawyer when we get sued.”
This conversation repeated itself the next two times I had to call emergency services. Keep in mind, as I was calling 911, I was barking out instructions to other people to go get necessary parties involved.
There was no policy in place for this - and there shouldn’t be, either. If there’s an emergency and time is critical, I’m not going to waste time on red tape. Either way, this all led to a complaint from one of the employees who went through first aid certification for the company and wasn’t being called to help with the situation.
My response? “We have people who know First Aid?”
HR, IT, Security, and Facilities: “Well, yeah. We’ve got like ten of them just in case something ever happens.”
Me: “Then can you explain to me why, in several years of managing at this company, I’ve never seen a list that tells me who any of those people are?”
And then we played the blame game - no one was responsible for circulating that list, but there definitely should have been one.
Whatever your plan is for emergencies, please keep the number of cooks in the kitchen to an absolute minimum. And don’t yell at the good Samaritan who called for help, either, because after holding it together and navigating through a medical crisis, his nerves are probably just a little bit frayed and he may be tempted to bite your head off. ∞
