Novant NHRMC’s latest grades: This week saw the release of hospital safety grades from Leapfrog, a national nonprofit hospital quality watchdog that releases letter grades twice a year. New Hanover Regional Medical Center got a C — for the fourth time in a row.
Next week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is expected to release its own updated hospital ratings. CMS gives between one and five stars, and NHRMC has dropped from a three-star to a two-star overall rating in the last several years. Notably, the hospital’s in-patient survey rating also recently dropped from three to two stars.
As I’ve written elsewhere, this is not academic. Leapfrog and CMS ratings are based on a host of patient safety and quality data, and poor scores reflect the reality of people who deal with avoidable infections, complications, and, yes, even deaths. Not to put too fine a point on it, but lower scores mean more human suffering — preventable suffering.
There’s a lot to unpack about the ratings, including what factors influence them and when the data they’re based on was gathered — some metrics deal with data that’s three or four years old, others use information that's far more recent.
To their credit, Novant has been increasingly proactive about scheduling interviews with me (and other journalists) when the scores are getting ready to come out. So, this coming Thursday, I’m planning to sit down with NHRMC President Laurie Whalin and Novant Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Heather Davis to work through the latest ratings.
I’ll admit, things with Novant have felt like Groundhog Day for the last few years: I ask them about the low scores, they tell me that lagging data gives a misleading impression and that real-time conditions are (and have been) improving, I ask them when the data will catch up with their improvements, and they say ‘soon.’ They must feel the same way — and I’m sure they are as eager as I am, if not more so, to see those ratings go up. As I said, it’s too their credit that they’re willing to keep talking, but I think we’d all like to have a different conversation. We’ll see how this next one goes.
Elections director update: This week, we heard that embattled New Hanover County Elections Director DeNay Harris had formally responded to a petition to remove her from her position, issued unanimously by the county’s Board of Elections.
The process, as I’ve touched on a bit before, is a bit complicated. At this point, under state law, North Carolina State Board of Elections Executive Director Sam Hayes has 20 days to make a decision. Sometimes, the state does overturn local petitions, especially if the local board makeup has changed, or if there’s been a split vote to remove a director. In this case, the same board that hired Harris now unanimously seeks to remove her. (Similarly, the state’s election board very occasionally overrules the executive director, but that’s unlikely in a case like this).
Still, it’s technically possible that Harris could be afforded a hearing with witnesses and other evidence in front of the state board.
Notably, we haven’t seen the full petition to remove Harris, although I’m familiar with some of the allegations it cites as grounds to terminate her employment. We also haven’t seen Harris’ full response. She’s now being represented by Wilmington-based attorney Gary Shipman, who issued a press release, calling the efforts to remove Harris “clearly pretextual, retaliatory, and unsupported by reliable evidence.”
However, Shipman declined to share her actual response for the time being. For that reason, we’re keeping our powder dry on this story until we can see exactly what the local board is accusing Harris of, exactly how she’s responding, and — at this point — what Hayes and, perhaps, the state board, make of both.
In the meantime, the elections office is reportedly quietly humming along. From what I hear, former NHC Elections Director Derek Bowens, who now works in Durham County, has been helping out. Bowens, who was the director when I first started reporting on local elections, is well respected by everyone I've asked about him, and so hopefully that's been a welcome resource for the office, which has seen a fair share of stress over the last two years.
Rough Men: The last editor’s note for this week is about the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, which recently took to social media to celebrate a freshly upgraded hallway at headquarters, complete with mural-sized inspirational quotes from a variety of sources: Pat Riley, Michael Jordan, Helen Keller, John Rohn, the Old Testament, and George Orwell … sort of.
Some took issue with the presence of religious quotes, painted on the walls at taxpayer expense. For me, as part of an array of quotes, the excerpts from scripture are less offensive to my Establishment Clause sensibilities than the “In God We Trust” painted prominently on cruisers. Notably, those local conservatives who are always on the hunt for all things Leftist in government had nothing to say about the quote from Keller, a dedicated socialist advocate, which read, “alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” I mean, it’s right there, guys.
But I digress — because I want to talk about the quote attributed to Orwell.
“Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf,” the quote reads.
The problem is, Orwell never said that. Nor did Winston Churchill or Rudyard Kipling, who are also sometimes given credit for the line, as noted by the impressively expansive Churchill Project at Hillsdale College. To be fair, Churchill, Kipling, and Orwell have all expressed some variation of the sentiment — which is very British in its balance of irony and pragmatism.
The intrepid Quote Investigator website tracked the origin of the words to Richard Grenier, a conservative film critic and columnist, who wrote in a 1993 Washington Times piece that “As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Best I can tell, Gernier is paraphrasing what he saw as Orwell’s sentiments, but the words are his own.
Since then, it appears others have occasionally taken Grenier’s words as Orwell’s own, including The New York Times Magazine, which did so in 2003. More recently, the quote became popular online after Kristi Noem gave a speech in March, on her way out as Department of Homeland Security Secretary, in which she referenced the quote. I will say, though there are many valid criticisms of Noem, she did accurately describe the line as “the quote that is often attributed to George Orwell.”
The closest version to the famed quote that is actually in Orwell’s writing is probably from his “Notes on Nationalism” essay, where he took a jab at hypocritical pacifists, describing them as “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.”
If that sounds harsh, remember he was writing this at the end of WWII, and the memory of Neville Chamberlain, dead just a few years, was still actively curdling in the British cultural imagination.
Certainly, Grenier, who built a decades-long career on “skewering the Cultural Left,” as Robert Bork put it, would have found common cause in mocking the hypocrisy of those who take the performative moral high ground.
All that said, is it somewhat embarrassing that NHCSO prominently displayed a fake quote on their hallway wall? Sure. It’s of a piece, I think, with those who post inspirational but misattributed quotes on their Facebook profiles: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” — Abraham Lincoln
Ok, but setting the cringe factor aside, and taking off the tweed jacket of my past profession as an English professor, what does it mean to put this Orwellian (Orwell-ish?) quote on the wall of the Sheriff’s Office near the briefing room, assuring deputies will see it regularly? Are they the rough men (and women), ready to do violence on our behalf?
The answer is: yeah, kind of.
There’s a whole column in this, but for now I’ll keep it short-ish.
Part of my job is critiquing law enforcement and holding it accountable, but I’ll admit it’s hard to get away from the bargain we’ve made by inventing the idea of law enforcement.
Few would like to return to a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all,’ and the 'law and order' of monarchs was capricious and unaccountable. So, instead, we have what amounts to a state monopoly on the use of force. It’s a pillar of our social order, which we’ve spent the last couple of centuries tweaking without undoing the central tenet. It's far from perfect, and the potential for abuse is self-evident. But because our law enforcement leaders are elected or appointed by those we elect, there is some accountability — and, of course, I'm grading on a historical scale.
There are abolitionists, but they’re in the minority. Even in the summer of 2020, when polling showed that a majority (58%) of Americans said policing needed ‘major changes,’ only 15% were in favor of abolishing law enforcement. More recent polling shows public opinion on law enforcement has improved over the last five years; while there are still serious calls for reform, the system is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
Kipling once lampooned those “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep.” How are those uniforms themselves supposed to feel? It’s no accident that Sheriffs and police chiefs, including some here in New Hanover County, refer to their deputies and officers as ‘the troops.’ Demonized or valorized, wearing a badge sets you apart, precisely because of an officer's special relationship to violence.
I suppose it’s a matter of interpretation. One hopes they are ‘ready’ to do violence as a last resort, not ‘ready’ in gleeful anticipation. In my experience, it is often the former but, unfortunately, sometimes the latter
