photo by: LMH Health

LMH Health, 325 Maine St., is pictured in May 2021.

Most employees of LMH Health are set to get a $500 bonus next month and a 3% wage increase for 2022.

Members of the LMH Board of Trustees were told that a $500 bonus would be given to full-time, non-executive staff members of LMH Health, while part-time employees would receive a $250 bonus.

LMH leaders also confirmed after the meeting that it will move ahead with a 3% across-the-board wage increase for employees, reflected on paychecks beginning Jan. 28. The Journal-World reported last month that a 3% wage increase was included as part of the hospital’s recently approved 2022 budget, but at that time hospital leaders said the pay increase would need a separate round of approvals from the board in December. However, the board was never asked to vote or discuss the matter at its meeting on Wednesday.

The meeting, though, did include plenty of discussion about employee fatigue and the stresses that labor pressures are putting on the hospital and its related doctors offices and other facilities.

Board members, though, were told that LMH posted a $1.8 million operating loss in November and that financial results for the hospital generally were deteriorating as the year progressed. The hospital largely had budgeted for the pandemic to be over by July. Instead, a new wave of COVID cases has emerged, and labor challenges have become acute.

“As we got past the summertime when we though the pandemic might be concluding, we instead saw a pivot toward increasing challenges with a tired workforce and limited labor,” Deb Cartwright, chief financial officer of LMH, told the board.

Russ Johnson, president and CEO of LMH Health, said many employees of the hospital simply were saying they couldn’t continue with the type of work schedules they’ve had during the last two years of the pandemic.

“People shifted into a different amount of work and wanted to take a break, or frankly, needed to take a break,” Johnson said.

That has resulted in LMH using much larger numbers of temporary, more expensive care providers — such as “traveling nurses” — than LMH ever has in the past. Johnson said the hospital has 43 employees who come from employment agencies compared with a more normal number of three or four agency employees. Those agency employees cost LMH about three times what a traditional employee would cost the hospital, Johnson said.

Johnson said hospital leaders had anticipated some of these challenges when they created the 2022 budget, but they are hitting the hospital quicker than expected.

“This tidal wave has hit the shore and is knocking us around a little bit,” Johnson said.

Board members said the $500 and $250 bonuses to employees were an important way to thank hospital employees for their loyalty and hard work. Some board members also lobbied to give the bonuses to relatively new employees who joined LMH after July 1. As the bonus program is currently crafted, those employees aren’t eligible, although many of them did receive sign-on bonuses. After the meeting, a spokeswoman for LMH said Johnson has decided to give a pro-rated bonus to those employees who joined LMH after July 1.

LMH, however, is delaying an end-of-year compensation program for about 70 executives of the hospital. Those executives have their compensation plans tied to certain financial metrics related to how LMH performed in 2021.

Johnson said there is still too much uncertainty about how LMH’s bottomline will look at the end of 2021 to determine what compensation amounts the executives would qualify for under the compensation formulas. He said that compensation program for executives would be revisited in late January or February once year-end financial numbers are complete.

LMH Health’s earnings are currently at $560,000 above what LMH budgeted to collect for the year. But given the mounting losses in recent months, Cartwright said she couldn’t guarantee that the hospital would beat or meet the 2021 budget.

In other news, the hospital board heard an update on COVID-19 activity. Traci Hoopingarner, LMH’s chief nursing officer, said case levels were near levels seen in early 2021.

She said of the 15 COVID patients currently in the hospital that 14 of them were unvaccinated.

“So, that continues to be a concern,” she said.

She said in the past week, three COVID patients have died at the hospital, although two of the three were not Douglas County residents so their deaths are not reflected in the local fatality statistics.

Hoopingarner said not all COVID patients at LMH were in the hospital solely for COVID, but also were admitted for other reasons and then were discovered to have COVID.

She told board members that overall patient volume numbers at the hospital are high, even though the hospital has not yet seen its seasonal rise in flu cases. She said patient volumes are high in Topeka and Kansas City hospitals, making it difficult most days for LMH to divert any patients to those facilities. As a result, she said a greater number of patients are being kept in the emergency department for a longer period of time while they are waiting to be admitted to the hospital.