Warning: You might want to lie down on a couch before reading this one.
As The Post’s David Seifman reported last week, a Kings County Hospital shrink on the city’s payroll raked in a mind-blowing $1.6 million in just the past three years.
That includes base pay of about $174,000 a year — and overtime that hit as much as $516,000 in just one year.
Nor was Dr. Quazi Rahman the hospital’s only psychiatrist to rack up perverse OT pay: Some 18 doctors there bloated their paychecks to more than $300,000 each last year by tacking on extra hours.
It’s enough to trigger massive depression.
And it’s also enough to cause New Yorkers to lose faith in Bloomberg administration management skills (supposedly one of its strong suits).
In Rahman’s case, taxpayers coughed up $307,353 in overtime last year, to cover a ludicrous 4,346 total hours worked — an average of 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for the entire year. Counting Christmas.
In 2009, as Seifman previously reported, taxpayers handed the good doc $689,000 after he clocked 5,940 hours — an average of 114 hours a week, or 16 hours a day, every day.
In one stint, Rahman worked 96 hours straight— four whole days in a row!
Rahman may have been paid to be on call for some of that time — and no doubt got some rest. Heck, maybe even a bite to eat, now and then.
But these kinds of absurd hours have got to whittle down a doctor’s effectiveness.
And while ER shrinks are in short supply, it’s not like Kings County (one of the city Health and Hospitals Corp.’s 11 acute-care facilities) has absolutely no other options.
For instance, it might have upped the salaries it offers, as low as $165,000, to lure applicants and boost manpower.
That might have even cut down on overall payroll costs; surely the hospital could find two shrinks who’d cost less than $536,000, Rahman’s three-year average pay.
More important, extra help would lead to better care for patients.
(And eliminate the city’s PR problem in having to explain why it paid a shrink more than a half-million bucks in overtime.)
Yes, finding good doctors at salaries taxpayers can afford isn’t easy. But Bloomberg & Co. are supposed to be up to tough management challenges like that.
Or is it having as tough a time finding good managers as it is shrinks?