Skip to main content

Kaiser mental health workers to begin five-day strike Monday across California


#KaiserPermanente #Therapists #Psychologists #Socialworkers #MFT #LCSW,

 About 4,000 unionized therapists, psychologists, social workers, and other mental health workers at 100 Kaiser Permanente medical offices across California plan to begin a five-day strike Monday.

 The strikes are slated to start at 6 a.m. Monday at 10 locations in Southern, Central and Northern California. In the Bay Area, workers will form picket lines Monday outside Kaiser’s San Francisco medical center on Geary Boulevard and two Santa Clara locations — the medical center on Lawrence Expressway and Tantau Clinic on Homestead Road.

 Protests by members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers will continue throughout the week at various locations. They plan to picket outside Kaiser’s Oakland medical center on Tuesday; Livermore, Redwood City, San Leandro, Vallejo and Walnut Creek medical centers on Wednesday; and Oakland, San Jose, San Rafael and Vacaville on Friday.

 The workers are objecting to what they say are long wait times — weeks or sometimes months — for patients trying to see a mental health professional for follow-up appointments.

 The union’s contract with Kaiser expired in September 2018. In December, thousands of NUHW workers engaged in a statewide strike over similar concerns about patient wait times.

 “We’re fighting to make Kaiser provide quality mental health care,” said Matt Hannon, a Kaiser psychologist in South San Francisco. “Our patients can’t get timely appointments, and our schedules are booked solid.”

 Kaiser facilities will remain open during the strike, a Kaiser spokeswoman said. Kaiser patients who have appointments with mental health clinicians scheduled for next week should plan to keep those appointments unless contacted by Kaiser to inform them otherwise, she said. Physicians, managers and non-unionized contract mental health workers will staff the appointments.

 “It is disappointing that, once again, the leadership of the National Union of Healthcare Workers is calling on our mental health therapists to walk away from their patients,” Kaiser Vice President of Communications John Nelson said in a statement. “This planned strike does not make sense given that we’re offering generous wages and benefits that will keep our therapists among the best compensated in Californian ... and have taken important steps to help address the nation’s crisis in mental health care — hiring hundreds of new therapists, building new treatment facilities, and investing $40 million to help people enter the mental health care profession.”
In 2013, Kaiser faced a $4 million fine by the California Department of Managed Health Care for inadequate patient access to mental health treatment. In 2017, the agency again criticized Kaiser for delays in behavioral health treatment but did not issue another fine.

By Catherine Ho -sfchronicle.com
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are we really listening to what MLK had to say?

#MartinLutherKingJr #MLK #CivilRights #DrKing In 2020, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday falls in a national election year, one that reminds us of the importance of voting rights, citizenship and political activism to the health of our democracy. King imagined America as a "beloved community" capable of defeating what he characterized as the triple threats of racism, militarism and materialism. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, alongside the 1954 Brown Supreme Court decision, represents the crown jewels of the civil rights movement's heroic period. Yet King quickly realized that policy transformations alone, including the right to vote, would be insufficient in realizing his goal of institutionalizing radical black citizenship toward the creation of the "beloved community." King argued that justice was what love looked like in public. 2020 also marks the 55th anniversary of the passage of the Voting...
Post a Comment
Read more

Coping With Moods: The Challenge of the Turbulent Mind

#Mood #Impulses #selfregulate #selfsoothe  #Triple5LightTherapy #BlackMaleTherapist #Psychotherapy The power of moods and impulses can be overwhelming, but we can learn to self-regulate and self-soothe through awareness practices like meditation and mindfulness. By developing a healthy dialogue with our emotional nature, we can access deeper parts of ourselves and become more resilient in the face of stress and pressure. Rather than being swept away by our ever-shifting moods, we can learn to pause and reflect before acting. by Gillian McCann, Ph.D., and Gitte Bechsgaard, RP
Post a Comment
Read more

9 things about MLK's speech and the March on Washington

 #MLK  #MartinLutherKingJr  #MarchonWashington #IHaveaDream "I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin." The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these words in 1963, but this was not the speech that would go down as one of the most important addresses in US history. King spoke these words in Detroit, two months before he addressed a crowd of nearly 250,000 with his resounding "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs on August 28, 1963. Several of King's staff members actually tried to discourage him from using the same "I have a dream" refrain again. As we all know, that didn't happen. But how this pivotal speech was crafted is just one of several interesting facts about what is one of the most important moments in the 2...
Post a Comment
Read more

Your Inner Critical Voice

#Negativevoice  #innercriticalvoice #innercritic #Introspection #Psychotherapy #MentalHealth #BlackTherapist #Triple5LightTherapy  Our inner voice performs all kinds of important tasks—but when it gets negative, it can be hard to turn off. Ethan Kross, a psychologist and neuroscientist who studies introspection, has a solution. By Clay Skipper- January 24, 2022 We’ve all got a voice in our head. (Maybe you can hear yours, right now, reading these words.) And though you’re intimately familiar with that inner voice, since it talks to you all day long, you might be surprised to learn just how incessant it is. According to one study, it can spew up to four thousand words a minute. If you’re awake for sixteen hours, that’s more than 3.8 million words every day. That’s because that voice does so much for you: It helps you keep information in your head (remembering, say, a phone number or items on a grocery list), simulates and plans for upcoming events, like a date or an interview, ...
Post a Comment
Read more