Conversations with Keith--December 2019

 

John Carroll, 2001

My first meeting with Keith Steffen was on October 5, 2001. It had taken me a while to get this appointment but I thought that the meeting would be fruitful. However, it did not take long to find out that would not be the case.

When I went into his office, Keith never extended his hand to shake hands. And during my other talks with him over the next few months, he never tried to shake hands.

In the October 5 meeting, I began by expressing my concerns regarding the lack of bed capacity at OSF and the long wait times for patients in the ER who needed to be admitted. I also brought up the fact that Hevesy had placed me on probation for 6 months after the email I had sent Keith on September 28, 2001. Keith replied that things were being done about the bed problem and that he could do nothing about Hevesy placing me on probation.

However, Keith changed the topic of the conversation very quickly. He did not seem to care an ounce regarding the medical center’s bed capacity or overcrowded ER. Keith seemed to be very concerned about a petition that was going around the hospital in my support and asked me the names of the people who started the petition. I did not tell him, of course, because I feared for their jobs if he found out their names. He repeatedly tried (unsuccessfully) to get their names from me.

Well, my recalcitrance at giving up the names to Keith made him upset. As our conversation continued, Keith likened me metaphorically to an uncontrolled “hemorrhage” in the ED which needed to be stopped and a “cancer” in the ED that needed to be “cut out before it metastasizes”. It was interesting to hear him using medical terms as he was having his rant.

Keith was also fixated on the concept of fear. He told me, “Fear is a good thing amongst employees.” Rather strange, I thought.

As the next couple of months went by, very unusual things happened in Keith’s office. During one meeting with him, Keith said, “You know, John, the Apostolic community has a problem with you.”(Keith is an Apostolic Christian). This statement caught me off guard. Many Apostolic Christian families in the Peoria area were host families for Haitian kids when they underwent surgery at Children’s Hospital of Illinois in Peoria. And these families became very close friends of mine. I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. Keith would look at the carpet, shuffle his feet, smile and say, “You know, John, when this comes out about you, it won’t be good.” I would ask him the same question each time—“When what comes out about me, Keith?” He wouldn’t answer me but would just shake his head and smile. He went through this same ritual with me several times over the course of the next few months.

My brother Tom went in to talk with Keith in December where he promptly told Tom, “There is a side of your brother that you don’t know.” This disturbed my brother greatly because there is no side of me that he doesn’t know. After talking with Keith, Tom was not impressed with Keith’s management style and could see exactly what Keith was doing smearing my reputation.

On December 5, Keith had a meeting with two Apostolic Christian nurses who worked at OSF. Keith told the nurses: “John has done very bad things. People don’t know this side of John.” One of the nurses had helped start another petition on my behalf which really irritated Keith. Keith threatened to sue that nurse even though she had done nothing wrong and cleared it with Human Resources at OSF before she started the petition. Keith wanted to know the status of that petition as well, and the nurse told him that people in the hospital were very afraid of him. Keith replied that fear was good. Keith then said that employees did not know what they were signing and that they did not know the “real John Carroll”.

Keith got on his fear routine once again and told the nurses that there should be more fear in the hospital. He went on to tell the nurses that he had spoken to Representative Ray Lahood and Monsignor Rohlfs and that they now understand that I have a problem. I had spoken to both of them and they were quite complimentary towards me. (I heard through the grapevine that Keith had made a very urgent phone call to Rohlfs one day to try and explain his side of things.) Keith even went on to say that “Rick Miller had been right all along.” When I asked the nurse if she meant that Keith was referring to me being frustrated in the ER, she said “no”. It appeared that Keith was referring to something else, something much worse than frustration. The other nurse said nothing but was listening to all of Steffen’s comments about me.

A well-known lady in the Peoria community, whose family had hosted a Haitian Hearts child, told me how she went to Keith’s office and he told her that if she knew the OSF side of the story, she would agree with Keith and OSF. She told me this story with her husband present. I could tell they were very apprehensive about what was occurring. Her husband had no idea what to say or do. They both had excellent jobs in the Peoria community and both knew what would happen if they went to battle against OSF. I hate to say this, but I never saw either of them again.

Another business lady in the community who had never met Keith went in on my behalf after she was told by Sister Judith Ann to do so. Keith talked a lot about the devil with her and stated, “When the devil ensnares someone and pushes him up against the wall, we find out what that person is made of.” This lady was quite scared and wanted to leave Keith’s office at that point. Keith commented to her on the way out that if she talked about their conversation “…maybe we won’t be friends anymore.” She had never met Keith prior to this and couldn’t wait to leave his office. When I asked Sue Wozniak about this a couple of months later she said “ it sounded like a threat”. My friend the business lady thought so too.

Keith talked outside the hospital as well. At his church in Washington, Il. he gossiped about me according to one of his fellow churchgoers. At one point, Steffen stated, that “each time he (Steffen) sees a Haitian child, it makes me (Steffen) want to puke.” Keith’s inappropriateness knew no bounds.

So there really wasn’t any confidentiality with Keith. And he wasn’t discreet with his thoughts about sick Haitian kids either.

Does this sound like the way the CEO of the largest employer in Peoria should act? Open and honest communication, one of the Sisters’ Mission Statements, was absent with Keith Steffen.

After Keith fired me on December 18, 2001, he distributed a fax to the rest of the medical center which was written by hospital spokesman Chris Lofgren. The fax was written as if Keith was trying to protect me.

And OSF told the Journal Star that my departure would not stop them from supporting Haitian Hearts. We knew that was false too….on July 12 of 2002, Keith stopped all financial support of Haitian Hearts.

Then things got worse.

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Denouement and Learning Points— 2019

This post has been painful to write. But the story needs to be told and maybe someone can be helped in the future.

Physicians across the country (and the world) frequently experience situations where patients are neglected in one form or another. But physicians also know that if they complain too much on behalf of the patients, it could end their careers.

I should have been “political” and asked other ED physicians to sign the email that I had written to Steffen in 2001. There is power in numbers and more physicians on board would have made it more difficult for Keith and George to discipline and fire all of us.

OSF is a big organization that does not admit mistakes. The fact that it is a vast Catholic Health Care System governed by Catholic sisters does not change this. I learned this first hand. And quite frankly, the OSF nuns lost control of their beloved hospital several decades ago.

Keith was a compromised and conflicted individual. He had to tow the OSF party line as did ED physicians George Hevesy and Rick Miller.

I made a big mistake in 2001. I should have never met with Keith alone in his office. I should have had an attorney with me. Keith had OSF-SFMC’s attorney Doug Marshall in our meetings and Marshall would intervene when Keith got on one of his rants. During one meeting, Marshall counseled Keith something to the effect…”Stop talking. He is writing everything down.” Marshall was right. I was writing down all of Keith’s inappropriate statements to me.

When I told Bishop Jenky what Keith was saying in his office, Jenky was enraged but did not know how to fight it because OSF is so strong in the Peoria community. Bishop Jenky frankly told me that he could not challenge OSF and their money.

I believed in 2001 that Keith Steffen did not want me bringing Haitian kids to OSF-SFMC for heart surgery. He had said that Haitian kids made him “want to puke”. And he said behind the scenes that he was going to stop Haitian Hearts at OSF–which he did in July 2002.

The OSF Sisters did not reign in Keith with his behavior at the medical center. Keith seemed to savor the concept of fear amongst employees as written above. He referred to the nursing staff as “widgets” and told me that unhappy nurses could go work at Methodist Hospital down the street.

Keith retired several years ago. During his time at OSF he created a toxic environment. The ED at OSF was seeing way too many patients for the size and number of beds the ED had. Keith and OSF admitted this in the mid-2000s with the construction of the new 250 million dollar OSF Milestone Project.

The fallout from Keith Steffen regarding Haitian Hearts patients has been severe. Young Haitian patients have died from medical neglect. This is not a legacy any moral hospital administrator would want.

 

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org