Internship at City of Hope - Volunteer Services Intern City of Hope Employee Review

Lovely hospital so caring in every possible way. Comprehensive customer service for patient’s families employees. I’ve been there a year and a half and I’m grateful every day.

The campus is enormous and beautiful. There’s just still a few old buildings hopefully will be remodeled soon.

Pretty good benefits, especially if you receive care at the hospital. Work from home/hybrid opportunities for some roles. EXCELLENT people to work with...you get to work with incredibly smart people on the cutting edge of research and scientific development. I have seen burgeoning trials turn into life-saving treatment. It feels wonderful to tell other people you are working for this organization that has done so much good for the community.

Things have been getting progressively worse since COVID, but really started to spiral when they bought CTCA. Despite the medical center and research arms pulling their weight, we are constantly bleeding money to CTCA, as well as whatever executive pet project is ongoing any particular year. We had our first layoffs in 30 years where they laid off people and kept others in a way which made no sense to any sort of workload or team responsibility or seniority (it felt like they picked randomly from a list). They are being blatant about continuing layoffs despite this being one of the best ROI years we have ever had. They are no longer running this organization with a non-profit mentality. There's nothing wrong with trying to be efficient or make money like for-profit, but they are now cutting costs at the expense of the work being done. Labs are being shut down and decades of LIFE-SAVING work lost in the process, not to mention all the human capital getting disrupted by having to change jobs/labs/research fields. Meanwhile, some new executive will sweep in and do their little pet project that majorly disrupts everyone's workflows every year, surely costs far too much money, and actually ends up being worse than the original. This happens in all areas - on the medical floor, in business ops, in Beckman, even org-wide projects. For example, the wealth of information that was on the old Intranet has now been split into three different systems, with a hoard of old documents, policies and procedures LOST forever. You can't even find accurate information on many people, and you can only hope most teams have actually updated their Sharepoint files and made pages (most still have not, likely because they relied on the old Intranet too much too and because of the layoffs don't have the manpower to devote to their sites). You have no way to look up who works on what team anymore unless you already have a name to go off of, meaning if you need to contact X team and they don't have a distribution list posted somewhere to SharePoint, you have to start hitting people up in Teams until someone knows someone who knows someone who knows who you need to contact. I've been using LinkedIn to find out who works on various internal teams now, as it is the only efficient way to find someone working in a particular department or office anymore. When that executive is done disrupting our lives, they put that pet project on their resume and run off to some higher paying job elsewhere, leaving us all worse for it. And it just keeps happening, year after year. Execs need to stop using COH as a resume building farm. Leadership is financially bloated and while they happily congratulate us for bringing in record amounts of money in revenue, they lay us off without any regard for how different teams function. For example, they cut 1/3rd from some central offices that serve EVERYONE of both Duarte organizations, and now the remaining handful are barely able to keep up - and indeed, a process that used to take 1 month now takes 4-5. How many labor hours have been lost in productivity - EVERYONE in research is being affected by this. But who cares as long as execs can show a better bottom line and then give themselves nice bonuses, assured of their own security with their generous golden umbrella clauses. Our ability to keep compliance will eventually suffer and I suspect 2025 will be the last time we have a decent audit, JC and compliance outcome. Even with that layoff, they have outright told us more layoffs are coming and hired a firm, Huron, to figure out who gets the axe. I have never worked before in an environment which was so hopeful and happy and promising 6 years ago, and is now so dismal that we're all constantly looking for new jobs or wishing we were anywhere else. Meanwhile, how we do things changes quarterly, and there's no ability anymore to look up new workflows if you weren't included in the original announcement e-mail. I've submitted forms to departments using the form linked on their SharePoint site only to be told a month later when I asked about a followup that that form was discontinued because senior leadership changed the workflow again! Again, ALL of these systems/workflows were working GREAT before, as exampled by our recent great audits/commission visits, etc. But now we're living in a Wild West of confusion with unsearchable a social media Intranet that is basically unusable. They still have not filed their 990s for 2025, and of course we all know the reasons why they are embarrassed to make their poor financial decisions public.