RNs picket 21 Kaiser Hospitals Today

allnurses Guide · Dec 20, 2012

Kaiser nurses are picketing at MANY facilities:

Kaiser nurses picket in Vacaville, Vallejo over staffing issues

12/20/2012 01:03:26 AM PST
It looked like the Kaiser Permanente nurses on Vaca Valley Parkway in Vacaville were on strike Wednesday afternoon, but union representatives insisted it was an "informational picketing." ...
... The nurses and union representatives of California Nurses Association said notices were sent earlier this month notifying them that Kaiser was considering layoffs.
The association, which represents 17,000 Kaiser registered nurses, said short staffing is a chronic problem in Kaiser emergency rooms, labor and delivery, and elsewhere.
"We're already short staffed," said Victoria Rondez, who is a nurse at Kaiser's Vallejo facility. "They shuffle the patients to make it look like we're overstaffed, but we never have enough."
Rondez warned that the proposed cuts aren't a one-time deal, but will continue and compromise better care.
The goal of the picket line, according to CNA board member Virginia Macalino, is to inform patients that they need more staff.
Macalino said their is protocol for notifying the administration is to file an Assignment Despite Objection report, which means the nurses will continue to care for patients despite their objections to being short staffed.
She added that those ADO reports are filed daily and any response from Kaiser isn't in a way that increases the staffing.
Macalino is a registered nurse and has worked for Kaiser for more than 10 years. She explained that staffing has progressively gotten worse during that time.
"The money that patients pay should go to patient care and nurses," she said. "We are direct care nurses and Kaiser doesn't need to take the direction of layoffs." ...
http://www.thereporter.com/ci_22230001/kaiser-nurses-picket-vacaville-vallejo-over-staffing-issues

Nurses at Kaiser hospital in San Rafael say staffing levels too low, hospital wants to reduce staffing further

... Gay Westfall, senior vice president of human resources for Kaiser's hospitals in Northern California, stated in a press release, "We have reached out to CNA to have a conversation about aligning staffing with the current numbers of patients in our hospitals, which is declining for all the right reasons — quality, service and improved utilization. We have not discussed layoffs."
Westfall went on to say that Kaiser is "seeing an ongoing shift in care delivery from the hospital to other settings such as outpatient clinics, and from those clinics to patients' homes, over the phone and online." ...
... Colleen Gibbons, one of the nurses who picketed in San Rafael Wednesday, said, "We're here to provide excellent care to our patients, and Kaiser keeps understaffing us and making it more difficult to provide that care."
Gibbons said nurses at the Kaiser hospital in San Rafael have filled out 300 Assignment Despite Objection forms so far this year — 69 during the month of November. Nurses file the forms to document formal objections to an unsafe, or potentially unsafe, patient care assignment.
Julie Puccinelli, a medical-surgical nurse who has worked at the San Rafael hospital for five years, said, "It's a way to protect ourselves when we feel an assignment jeopardizes our license." Puccinelli said she had filed "a couple of" ADO's herself.
Puccinelli said the patients she is seeing are sicker than in previous years and need more care than ever. She said that may be because Kaiser is "trying not to admit as easily as they used to" and is sending patients home sooner.
Pat Tomasello, a nurse who works in the intensive care unit of Kaiser's San Rafael hospital, said, "It's harder to get admitted into the hospital. It's harder to stay as a patient, and the mantra now is, 'Your family can take better care of you at home.' That is provided you have a family that knows how and is available."
http://m.marinij.com/marin/db_32459/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=jQkwudTt&full=true#display

kcmylorn · Dec 21, 2012

I think it would have be interesting( and probably a good laugh) for that reporter to ask that HR person-Gay Westfall, if the reasons for the picketing were not short staffing and a threat of a layoff- "What does SHE think the reason for the nurses picketing was?" Probably more crap flinging about people reaching out and aligning themselves.