Word: ombudsman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Miller advocates that managers create a climate in which employees can feel free to criticize. One step might be to appoint a company ombudsman with power to act on employees' complaints and to start his own investigations. Another would be for a company's directors to extend protection against job loss or demotion to employees who come before the board with disclosures. Some consumer advocates have suggested that Congress legislate protection against reprisal for wage earners who report the unlawful acts of their company, or testify before a-court or Government agency...
Short Circuit. Under the old charter, the public service commission was dominated by the power companies it was supposed to regulate; the public got short-circuited. Now provision is made for an ombudsman, a consumer counsel who will represent the public in utility-rate cases. In the past, a single state board of education tried to run both the public schools and the six-unit university system; the new constitution creates separate boards and gives the regents full control-without political interference-over the universities. Montana also limped along with a tight constitutional limit on property taxes, which imposed great...
Drawing for Stars and Stripes, the Army's newspaper, Mauldin was telling it like it is long before that dreadful phrase was invented (see cut). Mauldin also became a kind of ombudsman for the G.I. in his war with officers and gentlemen. When the general who administered Naples, for example, started handing out four-day jail terms to war-weary troops for minor dress infractions, Mauldin-and Willie and Joe-were there with a cartoon. "Them buttons was shot off when I took this town, sir," a bedraggled Willie tells a well-scrubbed rear-echelon lieutenant. In Mauldin...
Such service is part of Washington's daily routine. Although he had no medical experience, Washington, 56, was hired in 1969 as the emergency-room "ombudsman" because he could "get on with folks" in Chicago's sprawling South Side ghetto. Working from 4 p.m. to midnight, he handles anywhere from five to 25 patient problems and complaints a day, calming the nervous, interpreting medical instructions and, as he puts it, providing a "human element" in the crisis area of the emergency room...
Predictably, some of these ombudsman appointments are little more than token responses to the rising spirit of consumerism. Often the individuals are volunteers without any authority to act. But many hospitals are sincerely searching for ways to improve relations with their patients. New York's Mount Sinai Hospital has a staff of five to deal with its patients' nonmedical needs; Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital of Chicago has hired a patient representative to deal with the problems of those using its clinic and emergency room. Few institutions, however, have gone as far as New York Hospital...