Mr. Green,
I first would like to thank you for contacting the Ethics Line and giving us an opportunity to review your concerns. I have looked into your concerns about the Ethics Line process. I understand your belief that Mr. Pierce didn't interview all the witnesses you recommended and in addition didn't respond appropriately to information provided by the witnesses he did interview. I take complaints of this nature very seriously and have examined the matter.
After reviewing the facts of your case, I am convinced that a sufficiently through investigation was conducted. Please keep in mind that a through investigation involves more than merely interviewing the individuals you identified. My review indicates that appropriate witnesses were interviewed and a proper conclusion reached.
Sincerely,
Jerry Cecelic
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: MSmith2210@aol.com [mailto:MSmith2210@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 9:15 PM
To: Cecelic Jerone; mythoklast@mailstation.com; MSmith2210@aol.com
Subject: TO JERRY CECELIC FROM GALEN GREEN IN KCMO
Mr. Galen Green
8606 Chestnut Circle, Apt. 3
Kansas City, MO 64131
816-807-4957 or 523-1813
Msmith2210@aol.com
January 16, 2006
Mr. Jerone Cecelic
Asst. VP for Corporate Integrity
Hospital Corporation of America
One Park Plaza
Building 25 West
Nashville, TN 37203
Jerone.Cecelic@hcahealthcare.com
REF: CCI Report #0511-CHA-10005
Dear Mr. Cecelic,
There appears to be some sort of misunderstanding with regard to the disposition of an Ethics & Compliance complaint (#0511-CHA-10005) I filed with your department on November 1st of last year. I’m hoping that this letter will facilitate our moving forward toward clarifying the nature of this misunderstanding so as to bring us to a mutually satisfactory resolution of the issues raised in that complaint.
Let me begin by briefly recapping the highlights of a 22-minute telephone conversation between myself and a member of your staff, Mr. Matt Pierce, which took place shortly after noon (Central Time) on Thursday, December 29, 2005. Mr. Pierce began by informing me that he “couldn’t substantiate” the claims I’d made in my complaint. I reminded him that I’d provided him with the names, job titles and contact numbers of five (5) witnesses to the harassment and the consequent hostile work environment in question, and I asked him point-blank if he’d even bothered to interview all five of these witnesses whose testimony could, indeed, substantiate, verify and corroborate the claims I’d made in my complaint.
Mr. Pierce gave me his word that his investigation of my case had been “thorough,” but regretted that he couldn’t go into any of the details of it. I informed him that I’d spoken at length with two of the five witnesses only a few days earlier, and that both had assured me that they’d “given him an earful,” meaning that his claim not to have been able to substantiate my complaint rang hollow. I explained to him that it sounded as though he hadn’t tried very hard to get to the bottom of things and that it looked as though the conclusion he’d reached in my case had been “forgone.” He said that he was “sorry that you feel that way, Mr. Green;” to which I replied that it had absolutely nothing to do with my feelings, but rather with how everyone (except him) was likely to perceive the facts in the matter.
Some of the verifiable facts in the matter are these: Security Supervisor Bill Ludwig began harassing me within a short time after his arrival on the Baptist-Lutheran Medical Center campus in early 2004, creating an unacceptably hostile work environment for me and for those officers who had been my teammates. As if the transparently bogus nature of the write-ups to which I was subjected by Supvr. Ludwig weren’t sufficient evidence of his transparently malicious agenda, then surely the testimony of the five witnesses with whose names your Mr. Pierce was provided should have made the substantiation of my Ethics & Compliance complaint a so-called “slam-dunk.”
In the event that any of those names may have been mislaid or that Mr. Pierce’s interview notes may have met a similar fate, here are the five witnesses I provided him with:
Ms. Jean Dunham, B-LMC Security Officer and Shift Leader (816-223-6789)
2. Mr. James Bolton, B-LMC Security Officer (816-924-4965 or 405-5119)
3. Mr. Brian Deaver, Former B-LMC Security Supervisor (816-217-0780)
Ms. Heather Schuettenberg, Director of Admissions (816-276-7000)
Ms. Sonia Fennix, B-LMC Security Officer (816-276-7070)
As I started to say earlier, I know for a fact that Mr. Pierce did interview Officers Dunham and Bolton, and that each of them provided him with more than enough substantive firsthand testimony to get Supvr Ludwig terminated immediately from 99% of America’s most responsible corporations. (It’s not without direct bearing upon the central focus of this letter, Mr. Cecelic, that I mention here, parenthetically, that Officer Bolton contacted me [on Christmas Day, no less!] to complain that, only days after he’d “spilled his guts” to your Mr. Pierce, he himself began being harassed. Make of this what you will. When I ran it past Mr. Pierce, he seemed oblivious to it.)
Moreover, I’ve learned in recent days that your Mr. Pierce never contacted Former Security Supervisor Deaver, even though his voice mail has been fully functional throughout this entire charade. (My source for this is, of course, Supvr. Deaver himself, who has had more than his fair share of dealings with your department since his own wrongful termination in September of 2004.)
In all fairness to your Mr. Pierce, the inscrutable cloud of his highly suspect claim that he “couldn’t substantiate” my Ethics & Compliance complaint may have been intended to encompass his failure to get to the bottom of that component of my case involving B-LMC’s (former) Ethics & Compliance Officer, Mr. Brian Lidiak. To recap briefly, the centerpiece of my November 1st complaint to your department was this: that if Mr. Lidiak had done his job, Galen Green would still have his job. That this is so is a verifiable fact. That Mr. Pierce performed anything resembling a “thorough” investigation of this fact is extremely difficult for any careful observer to swallow.
While it is true that the only official (in-house) written documentation of my October 22, 2004 half-hour face-to-face meeting with Mr. Lidiak in his office at the hospital in which I myself “spilled my guts” and “gave him an earful” concerning the exact nature of the agenda-driven harassment to which I was being regularly subjected and of the counterproductively hostile work environment it was creating within my department . . . would have been Mr. Lidiak’s own notes and subsequent report to your office in Nashville, ample precedent abounds for getting at the truth in such “he said/he said” situations. Sworn depositions spring immediately to mind, as do interviews conducted with the aid of a polygraph. In fact, I offered, in a mid-December voice mail to Mr. Pierce, to submit to just such a polygraph – providing, of course, that both Mr. Lidiak and Supvr. Ludwig would do likewise. Your Mr. Pierce, however, never got back to me on this.
No matter how Mr. Pierce conceives of his role as an ostensible “investigator” within HCA’s Ethics & Compliance Dept., the rank and file among the company’s stakeholders, those of us “in the trenches” who signed on to do our assigned jobs without being hindered, slandered and/or harassed by corrupt, bullying, ill-trained, suborned, self-aggrandizing, and/or just plain incompetent supervisors such as Bill Ludwig, also signed on with the legally-grounded expectation that your department and all of its agents would protect us from such hostile work environments, as well as from the complicit negligence of the Brian Lidiak’s among us. This is the sum and substance of the compact, covenant and/or implied contract that’s been breeched – first when Brian Lidiak turned a blind eye to Bill Ludwig’s firing me in retaliation for reporting his fraudulent behavior – and now when Matt Pierce has chosen to “see no evil,” either in Supvr. Ludwig’s malfeasance or in Mr. Lidiak’s willful negligence.
All I’m asking of you, Mr. Cecelic, is a truly thorough investigation into this matter. Any such courageously thorough, unblinkered investigation of the abuses committed against Galen Green (not to mention against HCA’s Ethics & Compliance Policies) can only result in one of the three resolutions outlined on pages 6 & 7 of my September 14, 2005 Statement to Peer Review Panel. Although a copy of this key document should already be readily available to you in your department’s official file on my case (i.e. Report #0511-CHA-10005), along with the November 1, 2005 cover letter containing my Ethics & Compliance complaint itself, I will be mailing duplicate copies of those two documents, as well as a hard copy of this e-mail, to you at the above address, within the next day or two.
Of these “Three Most Viable Options” (as I refer to them in my official September 14th statement), it would now appear that the one I refer to as “Option #3” (on page 7) stands out as being by far the most viable (the most “win-win”). I’ll be eager to learn your opinion on this matter.
Meanwhile, please do not hesitate to contact me at any of the above numbers with any questions, comments or concerns which may arise from a truly thorough investigation into the abuses committed against me by HCA employees beginning in January of 2004, as well as from any good-faith discernment as to what sort of fair and equitable “win-win” resolution HCA deems to be most appropriate at this point.
Thank you very much for your patient attention. I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.
Sincerely,
Galen Green
(816-807-4957)
msmith2210@aol.com
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