Personal Vendetta or Witch Hunt?

Several weeks after I blogged about the fire alarm and intercom system at work (http://noeldlp.blogspot.com/2010/03/fire-drill-that-didnt-work-so-well.html) that got me in trouble thus receiving a final warning (http://noeldlp.blogspot.com/2010/04/final-warning-how-i-got-in-trouble-due.html), and despite my charge nurse reporting the same thing using the proper channels, our findings have not been addressed or maybe just totally ignored.

 I’m starting to believe what my friends have been telling me all along: that the safety officer/head of security has made the incident a vendetta against me by reporting my blog to the human resources department instead of looking at our concerns. I have not arrived at this conclusion easily, but the actions of the two departments who handled my write up didn’t seem to be concerned about how the alarm system did not work so well. Rather, they chose to find fault in the messenger instead of addressing the message. Maybe they took offense when a lowly employee found something they didn’t foresee.

This may be unrelated but there has been a rash of write ups against the Mental Health Unit staff in recent weeks, so maybe the administration is on a witch hunt for one reason or another.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to walk the straight and narrow path so they would not find another reason to counsel me again, or worst, fire me for exercising my freedom of speech.

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The Fire Drill That Didn’t Work So Well

We had a fire drill at work Monday night. Almost everything went well with our response time but there was one or two flaws in the system. If we weren’t pre-warned where the fire was supposed to be, we wouldn’t have known where to run to with our fire extinguishers. First the things that went right. When the alarm sounded, the patients were evacuated to a predetermined spot in the building and all the doors which unlock automatically when a fire alarm is tripped were covered by the remaining staff members in the unit. Three other staff members each grabbed a fire extinguisher and proceeded to the fire location.

 Now the things that didn’t go as planned. We heard no announcement on the intercom about where the fire was supposed to be. The reason for that is aside from the intercom system inside the nurse’s station, there was no other way to make an announcement from the rest of the building. If there was a real fire, the security guard would have to go in the psych unit, unlock a door to expose the fire panel which indicates what part of the building the alarm was set off. Security would then have to run to the nurse’s station to tell the staff there to announce “Code Red” and at what location. In the meantime, time was being wasted and the fire would have grown bigger.

Usually the overhead paging system is accessible from any telephone in the building so that the first person who observes the fire can trip an alarm then use the phone to announce “Code Red” so it can be heard throughout the whole building. Well, there is a disconnect in the way the building and the phone system is set up and the people who ran the drill had no answers except to notify their supervisor about it.

Another flaw in the system is that the lone security guard on the night shift has to do rounds across the street and is not always near the fire alarm panel. If there was a real fire and security was away, the staff would have to run around the hallways of the whole building to look for the fire. Yikes! It doesn’t seem they like planned the system very well.  I hope I’m mistaken and that there is really a paging system that we just don’t know about, but need to know ASAP.

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