ThedaCare drops lawsuit against Ascension over hiring of former employees, which had gained national spotlight
Madeline HeimAPPLETON - ThedaCare is dropping its lawsuit against Ascension Wisconsin over a group of former employees that they previously argued Ascension had improperly recruited to work at its Appleton hospital.
ThedaCare president and CEO Dr. Imran Andrabi told The Post-Crescent Friday that his health system needs to focus its efforts on finding people to fill the positions that were vacated, not on pursuing legal action.
Lawyers for ThedaCare filed a notice of voluntary dismissal of the case Friday with the Outagamie County clerk of courts.
ThedaCare has asked many of its employees who work in similar roles to the seven interventional radiology technologists and nurses who left to fill in the gaps, Andrabi said Friday, as well as seeking help from traveling agencies and other health systems. Other systems both within and outside of Wisconsin have offered resources, Andrabi said, though he declined to name them.
The Neenah hospital has not had to send any patients to other hospitals for lack of available care since these employees left, he said.
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In court on Monday, Lynn Detterman, president of ThedaCare's Neenah hospital, said the organization was spending about $11,000 on a health care training company to help get employees up to speed in covering the roles.
"This week has went well, next week seems to be on track and then beyond that we also continue to see a good process by which we should have the right number of people we need to be able to continue our care in trauma and stroke for the community," Andrabi said.
He said he hopes the relationship between ThedaCare and Ascension — which has contributed to community initiatives like Catalpa Health and COVID-19 resources like the vaccine clinic at the Fox Cities Exhibition Center — will continue.
The two Fox Valley hospitals gained national spotlight this week after ThedaCare filed the lawsuit last Thursday along with a request for Outagamie County Circuit Court Judge Mark McGinnis to block seven former at-will employees who worked at its Neenah hospital from starting new jobs at Ascension's St. Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton.
Lawyers for ThedaCare claimed Ascension had acted inappropriately by hiring away the majority of a specialized team of workers at once, and wrote in their complaint that doing so had jeopardized high-level stroke and trauma care in the community.
McGinnis granted an amended version of their request the next day, barring the employees from starting their jobs at Ascension until he made a further ruling on the matter.
All seven employees appeared in court Monday for a formal hearing. Those who testified said they'd given ThedaCare a chance to match Ascension's offer of higher pay and better work-life balance and had been told the short-term cost of losing them was not worth the long-term expense to ThedaCare of matching the offers.
On Monday, McGinnis overturned the temporary restraining order barring them from starting work at their new hospital, saying ThedaCare could find, and already was finding, alternate staffing solutions to fill in the gaps. All seven employees were able to start at Ascension Tuesday, and lawyers for ThedaCare said Monday they would compensate them for missing that day's work.
News of the lawsuit and request for the temporary injunction gained traction fast among the health care and legal communities, illustrating the struggle health care companies are facing trying to retain tired workers in year three of the coronavirus pandemic.
The New York Times and the Washington Post both wrote about the issue, and Ask A Manager, a popular Twitter account that gives advice on workplace conflicts, called it "seriously f'd up."
Andrabi said Friday that the national attention on the lawsuit had surprised him. He said he understood the impact on the employees who were caught in the dispute but said he felt ThedaCare's reasoning for pursuing legal action — preserving around-the-clock stroke and trauma care in the region, their lawyers argued — had been lost in social media discussions of it.
"What we were looking for is just some help to orderly transition a large number of people ... from one health system to another," Andrabi said. "It just created a huge gap, and we wanted some help in the interim to figure out how to bridge that gap for the community."
A spokesperson for Ascension Wisconsin did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.
Contact reporter Madeline Heim at 920-996-7266 or mheim@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @madeline_heim.