What happened
Umeå municipality's director of elderly care Pernilla Henriksson is leaving her position after ten years to instead lead an initiative on skills provision within healthcare and care. The decision follows a long series of reported irregularities at the Dragonen residential care home, where 465 incident reports were registered in just under four months. The municipality has launched an external review of the events at a cost of 415,000 kronor. According to city director Elin Pietroni, the management change is unrelated to the discovered deficiencies. Anna Karlander steps in as acting director pending a permanent replacement.
Our analysis
In Swedish elderly care, entirely different rules apply depending on where in the hierarchy you are. When the floor sounds the alarm about understaffing and unbearable stress, politicians and managers often point fingers downward, speaking of inadequate language skills or lack of competence. It is new Swedes who open the wards, wipe away tears, and carry the care every morning. But when operations collapse under management's responsibility, it is never the directors who take the blame.
Umeå municipality is executing a classic administrative maneuver. After hundreds of alerts regarding irregularities, the top manager responsible is not fired, but instead reassigned to lead the work on staffing provision. The person who steered an operation into a deep crisis is now supposed to teach the staff how to work.
It is convenient for those in power to blame the crisis in care on staff shortages rather than decades of underfunding and abysmal management. The price of leadership's failures is always paid by the elderly Swedes who need care and the new Swedes who wear out their backs on the floor.
Explained
An incident report is a written report from staff when something has gone wrong, become hazardous, or failed to comply with regulations in healthcare and care.