OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and the situation

1) Name and describe your organization.

The organization that I am choosing to complete the case analysis on is an urgent care
health center that I previously worked for, but I would like to keep it anonymous so I will
name it Fred’s Urgent Care. Fred’s Urgent Care is owned by a large hospital organization in
Arizona and is well known in the Southwest. Fred’s serviced walk-in patients on a non-
emergency basis ranging from illness to injuries. I had worked for this specific health care
center for six years and knew the business inside and out. Because of its association with the
large hospital group, Fred’s Urgent Care’s reputation was very good within the community.

2) Describe your role in the organization (it can be an internal or external role).

My role within this organization was a major one. I was the only back-office
assistant in the center per shift, which means it was only the health care provider (usually
a Medical Doctor, Physician Assistant, or Nurse Practitioner) and myself responsible for
patients the entire working day of a 12-hour shift. At the time of the incident, I was a
licensed radiologic technologist (x-ray tech). I acted as the “nurse” to the health care
provider which entailed giving medications, injections, taking x rays when needed,
cleaning wounds, assisting with stitches, explaining procedures, and discharging the
patient.

3) Describe the situation, including information you think the will help the reader
understand the most important elements of the situation.

The situation for my case analysis involves a health care provider, in this case it was a
Physician Assistant that I will call Tracy. I had worked with Tracy for about two years when she
had started her own side business that catered to concierge medicine. Concierge medicine is
patient centered and has a broad range of services provided. Like urgent care, concierge
medicine will treat illness and injuries, but focuses more on the functional operations of the
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body. For example, “gut health”, hormone regulation, and allergy testing are all very popular
with concierge medicine.

I had noticed that as I was discharging patients, Tracy would print out certain vitamins
and supplements that she had discussed with the patient. She was a partnering distributor of the
supplement brand and earned 10% of all sales attached with her name. Tracy would include her
code as a discount code for the patient and encouraged them to try the vitamins and purchase
regularly. She would also staple her side business’s card to their discharge paperwork and tell
the patients to follow up with her.

I viewed this behavior as a major conflict of interest. Not only was she using the patient
base to grow her own business, but she was profiting off the vitamins and supplements as well.
Patients go to urgent care for an immediate need for health care. I thought Tracy was taking
advantage of these patients to boost her own wealth. Not to mention, I was involved because I
had to discharge the patient with these instructions. I called the Ethics Hotline of my company
for this behavior. I was told that they needed specific names of patients to review their charts,
and I gave them two names that I had remembered. A few weeks later, Tracy mentioned to me
that someone from Ethics Department had called her and asked her about these situations. She
denied any wrongdoing and since it was not documented in any chart, then nothing could be
proven that she had done anything wrong.

I was extremely disappointed with the way this situation was handled. In her position at
Fred’s Urgent Care, Tracy was viewed and respected as a leader. Her decisions seemed to favor
her and not the organization, therefore, produced a common fallacy seen in organizations
described as “thirsting for power” (Bolman & Deal, 2017). This fallacy involves major key
players in an organization that are “…more interested in getting rich and expanding their turf
than expanding the company’s best interests” (Bolman & Deal, 2017). Tracy’s behavior and the
company’s reaction to it gave me little confidence in their Ethics Department and the overall
views of complex situations and how to handle them properly.

Tracy never stopped giving out vitamin recommendations or stapling her card to the
discharge paperwork. She eventually quit and maintained a successful business of concierge
medicine.

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 Reference

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing  organizations: Artistry, choice, and

leadership (6th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass