Sick leave abuse hurts patients

Sick leave should be used when you are truly ailing. For workers at Maui’s state-run hospitals, the threat of losing sick days as the state moves to privatize their workplace does not constitute a legitimate ailment.

Maui Memorial Medical Center and Kula Hospital & Clinic have seen a rise in the use of sick leave in recent months by their unionized workers as plans to privatize Maui’s public hospital system move forward under the supervision of Gov. David Ige.

Sure, some of these nurses and other workers might have the sniffles or maybe pulled a muscle. But Wesley Lo, chief executive officer of the Maui Region of the Hawaii Health Systems Corp., said the system on some days needs to cover for 40 to 50 employees. Perhaps it’s an epidemic.

Lo said the recent increase in the use of sick days has not posed a threat to patient care — yet. However, when administrators have to schedule other employees who must come in on overtime to cover the shifts of “sick” workers, how could that not affect patient care? Any abuse of sick days sets off a domino effect that ultimately leads to substandard care.

Hospital officials began noticing the increase in May and June, just after state lawmakers passed the option-for-privatization law for the Maui and Lanai medical facilities.

Unions say they have not advocated that its members burn through their sick leave, but Randy Perreira, executive director of the Hawaii Government Employees Association, said it wouldn’t surprise him if individual workers decided to use up their sick days before the transition to a private operator.

Sick leave should not be used to take a staycation. It should not be used simply because one does not feel like going to work. And while Perreira says he is not surprised, he should instead be encouraging members to simply show up and do their jobs.

About 1,500 employees work in the Maui facilities and about 98 percent of them are unionized. The United Public Workers union sued the state earlier this month to try to block implementation of the privatization law, saying it interferes with the union’s binding contracts with the state.

If the unions are hoping to win public support, having its members out on sick leave will not gain the empathy of taxpayers. It becomes just another story about the abuse of sick leave among state workers. The practice is rampant in the prison system, where dozens of corrections officers have no qualms calling in sick on Super Bowl Sunday or New Year’s Day.

The overtime paid to prison guards who work double shifts to cover for their sick colleagues costs the state millions in taxpayer dollars. And if there aren’t enough prison guards working on visiting days, families are simply turned away. Again, the trickle-down effect.

State workers are entitled to 21 days of sick leave annually, amounting to 1.75 days every month. But the generous allotment doesn’t entitle a state employee to use them without legitimate cause.

In the case of Maui’s public hospitals, “some of it is going to people who are sick, obviously. Some, of it is probably, anecdotally, related to that they’re nervous that they’re going to lose that sick leave benefit,” Lo said.

Indeed, sick leave is a benefit — a safety net, so to speak — but it should not be abused by a “use it or lose it” selfish mentality.