Oh Park Center, I have so much that I can say about you. How the mighty have fallen, especially after being absorbed in 2018 and gradually taken over by "we're totally a nonprofit but love profit so not really" Parkview Health. Park Center is a company that has a Now Hiring sign on its main campus front yard year round, and there are reasons for that. Park Center created the conditions for it and it is their fault. Here is a list to make this easier to read.
1. Park Center used to be a good family oriented company to work for, but they are not anymore and have atrophied over the last few years. Being employed at Park Center is like riding on a merry-go-round that is constantly on fire and never stops. Senior staff that have previously worked there for 20+ years are leaving the company in droves, and that is never a good sign. Furthermore, upper management has decided that this would be a great idea to dump more extravagant expectations on the staff who remain, further exasperating an already strained system.
2. Your care, welfare, safety, and security at Park Center is determined by a matter of position. If you are in upper management, then your life is great. You get to stay safe in an office or work remotely at present, and you rarely get to interact with clients directly. Your family never has to worry about whether or not you will make it home safe tonight, and you get a great salary and benefits to support them. For everyone else? You're frankly treated like garbage by upper management. They do not respect you. They will make sudden unsafe and unethical decisions for staff, shove it down your throat, and expect you to suck it up, smile, and be happy about it. Meanwhile, they are not at risk for the very decisions that they have made for subordinates. Additionally, they are often not proactive with their management style, they are reactive.
3. I worked at Park Center for over 2 years in a 24 hour transitional adult group home. Our goal was to prepare clients to live in a more independent environment. However, we had no rules to speak of for clients. Why? The short answer is because insurance money, so they could practically do whatever they wanted and you could not discipline them. Because that's how the real world works. Then clients would fail in the community and relapse back to the group home. The cycle would only repeat itself and was unethical for clients who actually wanted recovery and help there. It became the dumping ground for clients that no one else wanted to deal with.
4. This is my last point but it is the most important and is the reason that I voluntarily resigned. Park Center upper management does not care enough about staff safety and it was a recurring issue that gradually worsened over time. We had panic buttons but we did not have security cameras in the group home. It was not a locked unit because it was meant to be a "home-like environment." We only had up to two or three staff on site at one time and were expected to monitor up to 10 clients, so the numbers were disproportionate. When we would have clients with verbal or physical aggressive tenancies (which increased over 2020) upper management would only weakly say to "call police" or eventually to "call Parkview Security". The final straw was when we had an acute individual be admitted to the group home with a history of violence, psychosis, and physical aggression. This individual should not have been admitted into the program under any circumstances, but they were admitted by doctors and upper management. My managers protested this but they were ignored. This individual, unprovoked, snapped and punched right through a TV screen and broke it. This individual was taken to the hospital for about 2 weeks. Then during a staff meeting upper management informed us that this individual would be returning to the group home and that we would not be receiving additional safety or security measures to counterbalance it. Park Center is continually making unsafe and unethical business decisions. It is a powder keg waiting to blow up, and it will.
If you are considering working for Park Center (or if the name changes to the pretentious Parkview Behavior Health Institute) I implore you to do not walk. Run. Run away from this company as far and as fast as you can, especially if the position you are considering is not in clerical work and you're not upper management.
P.S. CEO Clyde Nix abruptly resigned in January 2021 after about a year and a half, so he is not the CEO anymore. Parkview Health will likely be making more decisions for Park Center going forward as they continue to eat them alive.
