Casey Ray has been caesar forever 30 years. She said the organisation was changing – now run by “MBAs” who she believed were more concerned with profits than the wellbeing of patients and staff.
That’s why she joined thousands of her fellow citizens National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) On Monday, they started a endless strike At the Kaiser facility in Northern California. Using details on its website, Kaiser denied the union’s claims.
The union is made up of more than 4,000 Kaiser mental health clinicians, including psychologists, therapists, social workers and chemical dependency counselors. More than 2,000 people are expected to picket lines in several Northern California cities this week, including San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto.
Licensed Clinical Social Worker Ray with Medical City News Through the phone During a strike on the front lines on Tuesday.In her view, Kaiser is working with the nation’s Demand rises Access mental health services by “burying their heads in the sand and pretending we don’t have a mental health crisis.”
She said NUHW’s high profile was part of its long-term battle to ensure mental health care was on par with other care provided by Kaiser. For example, if a Kaiser patient breaks her arm or is diagnosed with diabetes, her clinician should respond quickly to the problem and develop a treatment plan that includes ongoing care. Wray said Kaiser does not hold its mental health workers to the same standards. With the way Kaiser is currently operating, it is impossible for people seeking mental health care at its facilities to have immediate access to care and ongoing treatment, she said.
Before she started the strike, Ray said new patients she saw had to wait a month or more for another appointment. Sometimes, if a patient is really in a crisis, she’ll find a way to squeeze an appointment in her chart time.
“We force them into dates that don’t actually exist,” she said. “Then we work overtime to complete the paperwork because by law we have to do it within 24 to 48 hours. It’s a common practice for us.”
Internal Caesar File Patients who demonstrated an initial mental health assessment on June 13 had no follow-up appointments scheduled within a month in San Francisco, more than two months in Sacramento, and three months or more in the rest of Northern California.
Ray called the dilemma “ironic” because she claimed Kaiser had trained her and other mental health clinicians that they should meet with patients on a weekly basis. She said Kaiser trained them in this model and saw it as a best practice knowing that its mental health clinicians were seeing patients every four to 11 weeks.
While Ray agrees that weekly patient visits are the most efficient way to provide care, she says that model doesn’t work within Kaiser.
“The only way I could make it work was at my own expense,” she said.
Earlier this year, NUHW partnered with the state government to Through legislation Kaiser is required to allow its mental health clinicians to see their patients within two weeks of prior appointments. However, Ray said Kaiser did not have enough staffing to make it happen.
“Kaiser said it had enough clinicians to make it happen, but they didn’t,” she said. “For example, one of the things that’s been said in the media is ‘We’ve hired 200 new clinicians since January 2021.'” But we’ve lost 377 clinicians since then. They can’t keep up. “
The union recently surveyed hundreds of departing clinicians to learn more about their decision to quit. Many workers cited burnout as a result of the need to use record time to see patients whose mental health issues seemed too severe to be on hold for weeks. Wray added that many also said they felt their jobs were unethical — they were unable to provide high-quality care to patients while only seeing them every four to 11 weeks.
For Ray, Kaiser’s failure to meet NUHW’s requirements has to do with the fact that it is “focused on being a money-making institution despite being a non-profit.”
“Kaiser is run by businessmen. It’s no longer run by medical professionals,” she said. “Now it’s run by MBAs who care more about profits than they care about. Caesars $8.1 billion In terms of profits — if they put $200 million in mental health and really invest, we’re going to have some of the best mental health in the country. “
Caesars did not respond to a request for comment.However, the health system issued new page NUHW’s claims were denied on its website last week. It said it was hiring mental health clinicians “at a higher rate than membership growth” and claimed it had established escalation procedures that therapists could turn to when they were unable to schedule necessary follow-up appointments for patients.
In addition to the strike that started on Monday, the NUHW also went into operation full page ad in the larger newspapers in Northern California. The ads say the union “has made proposal after proposal to Kaiser to increase investment in timely care, but Kaiser has rejected all of them.”
union member Voting in June The strike continued after what they said was a failed one-year contract negotiation.Although Caesar did not avoid the strike, it avoid About 40,000 Caesars workers planned to strike last November. Workers had planned to strike at 14 West Coast hospitals to demand higher wages and benefits, but they struck four-year contracts with the health system.
Still, this week’s strike isn’t the first mental health worker strike that Kaiser has seen — mental health clinicians strike In May, at the Kaiser facility in Hawaii, the same concerns as workers currently picketing in California were cited.
These concerns appear to have been raised for some time.California fine In 2013, Kaiser received $4 million to treat problems with its mental health care services, including keeping patients waiting too long for appointments.country too currently under investigation Whether the health system is providing adequate healthcare to its patients after a sharp increase in complaints.
Photo: Filippobach, Getty Images
