Flat Line, Bottom Line
Is a hospital chain cutting corners for profit?
“We went from 330 to 275 union service and tech clerks and nursing assistants,” says R.N. Stella Chavez, a 15-year veteran of West Hills Hospital who serves on SEIU’s bargaining committee. “Patients now have more bedsores because there’s not enough staff to turn them over every two hours as they’re supposed to be. We’ve had so many nurses out on workman’s comp because of lift injuries.”
Chavez and others claim that HCA increasingly relies on community volunteers to perform tasks that were once done by union employees.
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“They come in and deliver medicines from pharmacies — some of them controlled substances,” Chavez alleges. “The volunteers will discharge patients, answer phones and regulate visitors.”
West Hills Hospital spokeswoman Jill Dolan denies that the volunteers are taking away union work or that their numbers have been increasing.
“These volunteers do jobs of a nonclinical nature and provide no hands-on services,” Dolan says. “They can’t even adjust a bed, [and] they do not deliver narcotics at all.”
The night before Friday’s contract talks (which shuttle back and forth between Pasadena and San Jose), Assemblyman Lloyd Levine chaired a town-hall meeting of about 100 people at Canoga Park’s Our Lady of the Valley Catholic Church to air employee and community grievances against HCA and its nearby affiliate, West Hills Hospital. During a break, West Hills R.N. Alicia Taboada explained that even though California mandates a 5-to-1 nurse-to-patient ratio, she’ll often show up for work to find herself assigned to six patients. She said that, like many nurses, she’ll file Assignment Despite Objection forms complaining of understaffing, but that since Governor Schwarzenegger cut funding for the state’s Department of Health Services, it takes six to eight months for the department to investigate these claims.
Taboada says that in addition to having deeply cut its nursing-assistant numbers, West Hills increasingly relies on lower-paid, short-term “traveling nurses” and one-day temps — neither of whom have company benefits.
The contract negotiations have dragged on since January. Union employees at all five hospitals have authorized a strike, although such a walkout will likely only last a day. Last Sunday, the union, which is required to give 10 days’ notice before striking, set August 31 as the strike-notification date.
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