National Nurses United

Slice and Dice:4 5/29/09 12:34 AM Page 14 find her a different position. "The thing that's most upsetting is that our patients are not going to get the care they should. There will be more recidivism and some transplant deaths, and we're going to see amputations." UCLA is just one of many hospitals that are using the recession as a reason, legitimate or not, to eliminate patient care services and cut staff. Hospitals are taking advantage of the economic downturn to plead financial hardship and make the unpopular decisions that would have been harder to justify in flush times. Hospitals see no more need to retain departments that may have been dangling on by a thread financially. These often include psych, pediatrics, or skilled nursing and sub-acute units. Hospitals are trying to merge units that require better RN staffing with ones that do not, making the staffing obligations murky and unsafe. Outpatient clinics are at high risk as well by getting their hours reduced or shut down entirely. Eager to reduce labor costs, hospitals are lobbying to lay off RNs and, when met with resistance, doing things like stepping up discipline and restricting legitimate overtime to make the workplace so miserable that they hope RNs quit on their own. While it's true that some hospitals have lost money over the past year, it's also true that most hospitals are still profitable, and the ones running in the red are often part of larger hospital chains that have consistently reported huge profits year after year. For example, the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) reports that, despite the deficits in home health, UCLA Medical Center made about $36.3 million in the past year, and that the UC medical centers overall made almost $346 million in the same time period. And also according to OSPHD figures, Kaiser Permanente of Northern California over the past year made a little more than $1 billion in net income while posting almost that much the year before, and hundreds of millions in profits for several years before that. "These hospitals are all crying budget poor, but the truth is that they've lost money in the stock market, just like other companies," said Robert Marth, a critical care RN at Kaiser Permanente in Hayward, Calif. and a member of the CNA/NNOC board of directors. "They're asking patients, nurses, and physicians to foot the bill by cutting back services. This is wrong." That's the bad news. The good news is that registered nurses organized and unionized through CNA/NNOC can as a group fight back against these cuts, as many are already doing. "We are going to be out in the streets, informing members and the public and state "These hospitals are all crying budget poor, but the truth is that they've lost money in the stock market, just like other companies. They're asking patients, nurses, and physicians to foot the bill by cutting back services. This is wrong." 14 REGISTERED NURSE what is going on," said Marth about Kaiser's plans to scale back its medicine clinic services and hours. "We're not going to just let them get away with it." Kaiser RNs in the Northern California region have noticed the most dramatic changes to the way their urgent care medicine clinics and emergency departments are structured. These departments are where sick members often turn for help, and where anyone short of being admitted to the hospital will be treated. In the name of creating more daytime appointments and getting to talk to a doctor without having to make a copayment, Kaiser in the East Bay communities of the San Francisco Bay Area is virtually eliminating weekday evening urgent care clinic hours, cutting hours in half on Sundays, and as a whole directing more patients into telephone consultations with physicians – where doctors never actually see or touch patients but diagnose them over the phone. Just a few W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G M AY 2 0 0 9

• Cover