FREE//GRATUITO
PUBLISHED BY ACCIÓN LATINA
August 25-September 7, 2022
Vol. 52 No. 17
KAISER THERAPISTS STRIKE TO DEMAND BETTER WORKING CONDITIONS,TIMELY PATIENT CARE TERAPEUTAS DE KAISER EN HUELGA, EXIGEN MEJOR ATENCIÓN AL PACIENTE Mara Cavallaro
El 15 de agosto de 2022, más de dos mil médicos de salud mental iniciaron huelgas en varias instalaciones de Kaiser en el norte de California y el Valle Central, incluido el Centro Médico de San Francisco. Los huelguistas exigen se tomen medidas para abordar las condiciones de falta de personal y exceso de carga laboral, que afectan a sus pacientes. On Aug. 15, 2022, more than 2,000 mental health clinicians formed picket lines at various Kaiser facilities across Northern California and the Central Valley, including Kaiser’s San Francisco Medical Center. The striking mental health clinicians are demanding action to address understaffing and overworking conditions, which negatively impact their patients. Photo: Jeremy Word
El Tecolote Mara Cavallaro is El Tecolote’s Report for America Corps Member who reports on mental health and healthcare inequality in the Latinx community.
O
n Monday August 15, more than 2,000 Kaiser mental health clinicians went on strike in Northern California and the Central Valley to demand the work conditions necessary to provide adequate care. According to therapists, Kaiser mental health is understaffed, employees are overworked, and patients—including those at high risk—have to wait months for appointments. Outside of the San Francisco Medical Center on Geary Street, on the first day of the open-ended strike, some 100 picketers could be heard from a block away. “Healthcare not corporate welfare! Care delayed is care denied! Workers united will never be divided!” These call-and-response chants are memorized—many have done this before. In the last four years, Kaiser’s Northern California mental health clinicians have gone on strike six times. Last week, clinicians agreed to Kaiser’s wage offer, but the HMO rejected the bargaining team’s demands for increased staffing and reduction of appointment wait times, according to the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). The strike, a “last resort” for the union, comes after 13 months of negotiation. “I was pregnant when we started... My baby turned one,” Ilana Marcucci-Morris, an adult psychiatrist in Oakland, said in a midday speech. This year alone, 668 therapists have left Kaiser—double the rate of the year prior, when 335 clinicians left. An overwhelming majority of departing providers surveyed by the union—85 percent—said they chose to leave because their workloads were unsustainable. 76 percent described being unable to “treat patients in line with standards of care and medical necessity.” Kaiser employs just one full-time mental health clinician for every 2,600 Kaiser members in Northern California, according to the NUHW. “Care Delayed is Care Denied” Despite SB 221, a law that went into effect this July that requires timely mental health care, Kaiser patients are routinely made to wait as long as months for appointments. According to Luz Maria Daley, a psychologist at Kaiser’s Women’s Health Depart-
Mara Cavallaro
“It’s time for Kaiser to stop padding its pockets and start providing care that helps patients get better.” - Natalie Rogers, therapist
ment in Modesto, the delay for follow ups with patients can be anywhere from six to twelve weeks. “When I’m…trying to transfer a patient to a higher level of care, there’s so many hoops that I have to go through to get management to find somebody to see them at a sooner time than three months from now,” she told El Tecolote. “We’re talking women with postpartum depression, or that are at risk for suicide—and I can’t get them to be seen by anyone.” When Julia Gitis had her first baby, in April of 2018, she struggled with postpartum depression. She recalls not experiencing any of what she had been taught to expect from motherhood—that “‘it [was] going to be so beautiful, it’s going to be so great, I’m going to be a natural mother, my baby is going to fall asleep in my arms and we’re going to snuggle.’ None of that happens when you have a colicky baby and none of that
happens when you have postpartum depression…there was nothing beautiful about it.” None of the parenting classes she took at Kaiser in San Francisco talked about postpartum depression, she recalled. She wasn’t prepared. Gitis expressed that she was struggling to her OBGYN, but didn’t get an appointment with a Kaiser psychologist until October—six months after childbirth. “I got a lot of value out of it,” she said, and wanted to come back. But “it basically wasn’t an option at all.” Instead, she said she was asked if she wanted to come back in “four to six months.” In February of this year, Cynthia Valencia, a UC Berkeley graduate student in psychology, tried to see a therapist through Kaiser. At the time, she was going through infertility treatments that were “causing a lot of See STRIKE, page 9
El Tecolote Mara Cavallaro es miembro de Report for America y reporta para El Tecolote sobre la salud mental y la desigualdad en la atención médica de la comunidad Latinx.
E
l lunes 15 de agosto, más de dos mil médicos de salud mental de Kaiser se declararon en huelga en el norte de California y el Valle Central y con ello exigir las condiciones laborales necesarias para brindar una atención adecuada. Según los terapeutas, el departamento de salud mental de Kaiser no tiene suficiente personal, los empleados están sobrecargados de trabajo y los pacientes, incluidos los de alto riesgo, tienen que esperar meses para su cita. Afuera del Centro Médico de San Francisco de la calle Geary, el primer día de la huelga, se podía escuchar a un centenar de huelguistas a una cuadra de distancia. “¡Cuidado de la salud, no el bienestar corporativo! ¡La atención retrasada es atención denegada! ¡Los trabajadores unidos jamás serán divididos!”. Estas proclamas están memorizadas; muchos ya las han dicho antes. En los últimos cuatro años, los médicos de salud mental de
Kaiser al norte de California se han ido a huelga en seis ocasiones. La semana pasada, los médicos aceptaron la oferta salarial de Kaiser, pero la Organización para el cuidado de la salud (HMO, por sus siglas en inglés) rechazó las demandas del equipo de negociación de aumentar el personal y reducir los tiempos de espera para las citas, según el Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Salud (NUHW, también por sus siglas en inglés). La huelga, el “último recurso” del sindicato, se produjo tras 13 meses de negociación. “Estaba embarazada cuando empezamos... Mi bebé cumplió un año”, dijo Marcucci-Morris, psiquiatra de adultos en Oakland, en su discurso al mediodía. Solo este año, 668 terapeutas se han ido de Kaiser, el doble de la tasa del año anterior, cuando se fueron 335 médicos. Una abrumadora mayoría de estos proveedores al ser encuestados por el sindicato (85 por ciento) dijeron haber optado por irse por la insostenible carga laboral. El 76 por ciento describió que no podía “tratar a los pacientes de acuerdo con los estándares de atención y la necesidad médica”. Kaiser emplea solo un médico de salud mental de tiempo completo por cada 2600 miembros de Kaiser en el norte de California, según el NUHW. Vea KAISER, página 9