Houston Methodist Hospital

The Quarantine Zone
1

I just read a blurb on Yahoo News about a federal ruling on whether hospitals can compel their employees to get vaccinated. This part jumped out at me:

After months of warnings, Houston Methodist had put [more than 170 of its 26,000 employees on unpaid suspension Monday. They were told they would be fired it they weren’t vaccinated by June 21.

Chalk this up to my unfamiliarity with large urban hospitals, but is 26,000 employees a lot? That’s like the enrollment for two decent-sized state colleges!

2

It’s a system of hospitals, not a single campus. They have dozens of facilities ranging from the big hospitals to small outpatient facilities.

3

And they have been around forever. I was born in one just after dirt was formed.

4

I live in New Hampshire, that has a tiny population compared to Texas, and even our largest hospital system has over 6,000 employees according to an article from this spring.

5

This ruling made me go to a local hospital’s radiology website and give some feedback.

A month or so ago I got a mammogram, and through chatting I found that the technician had not been vaccinated and wasn’t intending to get vaccinated. I was taken aback by this and didn’t say anything at the time. Mammogram technicians get their face about 12" away from your face as they work, and even though we were both masked, I was very uneasy.

Today I called her out on their website and said that I expected better from a Stanford-associated facility. I don’t know if it’ll do any good.

6

I was wondering about how big they were. Read a blurb in the newspaper this morning about this case. Gotta love the judge -

I hope the inevitable appeals get slapped down just as hard.

7

Methodist has nearly 300 locations in the greater Houston area.

And FWIW, Texas has 10 public universities larger than 26,000 students, with the largest two (UT and A&M) accounting for over 111,000 students.

8

That’s not going to be just doctors-- that’s going to be every nurse’s aid, and custodial staff member, the people who work in the gift shop, the IT people, the non-janitorial maintenance people (someone makes sure all the TVs in the patient rooms are working), and everyone working in food prep. Even in a single building, it’s a lot of people. There’s someone who’s job it is to manage volunteers, and someone whose job it is to drum up donations. There are staff lawyers, and staff social workers. There are people who work in the laundry.

I was a candy striper in the 1980s, and we got a “job tree” of all the employees just in the one building where we were volunteering. It was massive. And that was 40 years ago.

9

Some of the jobs will also need to be staffed 24/7; which, if most people are going to work 5 shifts a week (1 per day and 2 days off), and allowing a bit of leeway for sick days and vacations, means probably close to 5 employees required for each such job.