Need Help
I’m a hospitalist attending, just starting my second year out of residency. My current hospital has been my only attending position, so I don’t really have much to compare it to.
Our hospital has an anonymous reporting system in place that is mostly designed to catch events that may risk patient safety, but also has parameters to catch general grievances. After nearly 10 months of work without issue, I started to find myself on the receiving end of a number of unfounded complaints, and I’m starting to think they’re more personal than professional in origin. I can’t tell exactly who has been submitting them, but I know through context that most of them are coming from ED nurses, with whom I only interact on my rare admitting days.
For example, i am receiving anonymous reports against me for my handling of trivial matters like fluid administration in lactic acidosis or dehydration. Another complaint had them review my handling of potassium repletion in a patient with moderate hypokalemia (who was fully replete in 8 hours btw). For the latter issue, my boss even said that we didn’t need to review it together because it was “BS”, my medical management was sound on his review, and “someone definitely doesn’t like you down there”. Other times I’ll have nurses who refuse to follow through on my orders without me coming and explaining my rationale to them, regardless of how busy I am with more critical patients. Nevertheless, when I ask leadership for how to combat this, or where I can improve if there are some behavioral patterns I’m not seeing, I always get placated that there’s nothing that can be done about this. Even going to HR has left me with empty promises that they’ll “look into it”, without any substantive action.
In my eyes, I’m clearly being put under a microscope and/or targeted by one person or a few people who have grudges against me for whatever reason and who are just throwing things at the wall to hope something sticks against me. I’ve also gone out of my way to become part of the local community, and have made tons of friends over the past year (doctors, nurses, environmental staff) with whom I hang out regularly outside of work.
Leadership has also had nothing but great things to say about me, even during my first annual review last week. They literally wrote “N/A” in the areas for improvement and wrote a great blurb about how valuable of a team member I’ve become.
I hate to think this way, and I hate to feel like I have a target on my back, but I now go to work every day feeling like i have to be absolutely perfect or even the tiniest of errors may come up during these case reviews. It’s just purely unsettling and unsustainable. I would’ve left after the first couple months of this starting, because I don’t want to be put in a position to fail or have my record tarnished for minor errors. However, I’m currently locked in due to my “golden handcuffs“ signing bonus I would have to repay (most of my emergency savings and half of my 401k that isn’t yet fully vested).
My sinking/gut feeling is that this wave of dissent toward me has to do with my race. I’m a 6’3 black man who moved to the northern part of a midwestern state on the Canadian border. I’m a type A personality, like many of us, but I’m fairly laid back compared to my partners. I’m also sure many folks here have never had to take orders from someone so different than their norm. There aren’t many people who look like me in town, and far less in the hospital. I knew this might be an issue moving up here, but I’d hoped it wouldn’t track inside the hospital (I actually feel much more openly welcomed when I’m out in the community). The final piece rounding out this portion of my theory is that on several occasions, I’ve gone to the ED and they were playing uncensored music frequently saying the N-word and nobody bats an eye. It just feels off.
Any advice?