Late on the afternoon of March 13, the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System issued a statement, announcing it had fired its CEO, Michael McBride, after just a little more than year on the job.
The timing of the announcement was curious: The following day, FMOL’s flagship institution—Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, the Baton Rouge hospital market leader—was set to release the findings of a months-long audit into a scandal involving its former chief fundraiser, John Paul Funes, fired last fall for allegedly embezzling $810,000 from the OLOL Foundation.
As Business Report details in its new cover package, FMOL officials said the two events were not connected, but, no doubt, the optics were bad. Especially when it became public days later that members of the FMOL board of trustees—who had given McBride a positive performance evaluation and a raise just weeks earlier on his one-year anniversary—had not only not been consulted on the firing but were also sharply divided over it. So upset was board chair James Moore, a respected businessman from north Louisiana, that he resigned.
It’s easy to simply connect the obvious dots and deduce McBride was fired because of the Funes scandal, but the reasons for his termination are more complicated than that.
That’s especially apparent based on a three-page letter McBride wrote to his board of trustees shortly before his termination. The contents of the letter, if accurate, paint the picture of an outsider trying to implement changes—including the removal of OLOL CEO Scott Wester—and the problems that resulted.
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