I guess there must be a lot of kookaloonies in Brooklyn, because one particular Kings County Hospital psychiatrist is having to put in a whole lot of overtime!
Before giving you the facts, my niece is a nurse practitioner in an extremely busy neonatal intensive care unit. She works twelve hour shifts and is exhausted when she gets home. She works about four of these shifts a week and cherishes her days away from the hospital. It’s a grueling schedule.
Not so with staff psychiatrist, Dr. Quasi Rahman, though. He clocked in 3,820 hours of overtime in 2009, or 73 hours a week, on top of his regular 40-hour schedule! Yes, the good doctor earned $515,700 in overtime working an average of more than 110 hours a week for a full year – including one stretch of 96 hours straight. And that’s on top of his base salary of $173,503. His total taxpayer-funded compensation came to $689,203.
I doubt whether this abuse would have occurred for so long had the good doctor been working for a private hospital. Shame on him and shame on the hospital for failing to provide any oversight in this matter. But, as usual, who cares? It’s not their money.
