Business & Tech

Kaiser Nurses in Oakland to Picket Next Week

The nurses say under-staffing in emergency care is endangering and 'short-changing' patients.

Registered nurses will picket 21 Kaiser Permanente hospitals in California — including the Oakland Medical Center, 280 W MacArthur Blvd. — on Wednesday, Dec. 19, to protest what they say is "persistently inadequate nurse staffing" in emergency care and other hospital areas, as well as patients being turned away from needed care, the California Nurses Association (CNA) and National Nurses United (NNU) announced Friday.

Picketing at all 21 hospitals will take place from 2 to 6 p.m. 

In a letter to incoming Kaiser CEO Bernard Tyson, dated Nov. 30, CNA Co-President Zenei Cortez, RN, said that the RNs are alarmed that Kaiser is “consistently and systematically failing to provide sufficient staff to take care of their patients.” 

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This concern, she wrote, “has been raised with executives locally and regionally in many formats.”

CNA, which represents 17,000 Kaiser RNs, says short-staffing has become a chronic problem in Kaiser emergency rooms, labor and delivery, general medical units, and other hospital areas.

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In addition, the RNs charge, Kaiser is too often sending patients home from the hospital prematurely and expecting family members to care for patients who should still be in the hospital.  

“Kaiser has refused to provide the nursing staff needed to safely take care of patients in our hospitals,” said Katy Roemer, RN, Kaiser Oakland.  “We are seeing patients who used to be admitted into the hospital for care now being forced to stay in the Emergency Department for hours and hours.”

The RNs say they are calling on Kaiser to:

  • Immediately address short-staffing, including "staffing hospitals and clinics by patient need, not on arbitrary regional budget goals."
  • Admit all patients who need care. "No patient should have to wait, as many do now, in 23-hour 'observation' units before being appropriately admitted for in-patient care," they say.
  • Staff hospitals with permanently scheduled RNs "who are committed to their local communities, rather than the current over-reliance on temporary and travel RNs."

“Kaiser nurses in our hospital have verbalized, documented and reported over 500 episodes of unsafe staffing violations in the hospital in 2012,” said Leesa Evans, RN Kaiser Walnut Creek. “When RNs advocate for the time patients need for medical care, the response is often, 'we don’t have anybody else.' Unreliable staffing leads to poor-quality patient care that this profitable giant could easily remediate, but will not, as it remains more profitable to under-staff.”  

In response, Gay Westfall, senior vice-president of Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Health Plan Northern California, said in a prepared statement, “The union leadership’s claims about Kaiser Permanente have little to do with facts, and are a tremendous disservice to the outstanding work being done each and every day by our nurses, physicians and staff on behalf of our members and patients."

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