Deal struck to end two-month Kaiser therapists strike
After 10 long weeks off the job, hundreds of striking therapists at Northern California Kaiser Permanente reached a tentative deal early Tuesday for a new four-year contract.
The health care giant and the union representing the 2,000 mental health workers had been clashing for months over staffing issues amid a pandemic surge in demand from its patients. Details of the deal, announced by the company and its union, were not immediately disclosed.
The new pact aims to put an end to patient woes, including canceled and rescheduled visits, a search for new providers and uncertainty over an end to the strike. Kaiser serves 4.5 million people in the Northern California region.
“The new 4-year agreement will benefit Kaiser Permanente patients and drive collaborative efforts aimed at improving access to mental health care, while at the same time recognizing and better supporting mental health therapists in their important work,” the National Union of Healthcare Workers and Kaiser said in a joint statement on Tuesday.
Kaiser mental health workers were set to vote to ratify the new agreement starting Tuesday night. Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg helped broker the agreement, according to Kaiser and the union.
The strike by Kaiser’s mental health professionals followed more than two years of coronavirus-related mental health care challenges that flooded providers with new patients and cases.
Beginning Aug. 15, hundreds of Kaiser therapists stopped coming in to work after raising concerns of long wait times for mental health services and staffing issues that were preventing them from effectively treating patients. A bargaining session that ended in early August failed to reach an agreement.
Without a deal, psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists and chemical dependency counselors took to the picket line. Union researchers said an estimated 20,000 patients would be impacted as their appointments were rescheduled or they had to seek care from a new provider.
Laura Bramble, one of those patients, said she was frustrated and confused when her mental health appointments were cancelled, upending care that she needs on a weekly basis to deal with anxiety and depression.
Bramble, in an interview Tuesday, said was was outraged that Kaiser Permanente allowed the strike to continue for so long, preventing her from receiving needed care.
“If this had been a chemotherapy department or surgical nurses or anesthesiologists, would Kaiser have canceled surgeries, appointments and everything for ten weeks?” she asked? “Mental health is health.”
The strike didn’t occur in a vacuum. Work stoppages dealt blows to services at several Bay Area hospitals this year, including nurses at Stanford and Sutter Health hospitals and nurses’ assistants, aides and surgical techs at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City. Kaiser technicians, phlebotomists and housekeepers also walked out and held a strike back in November.
But those actions didn’t last as long as this one as the two sides quarreled over how many administrative hours therapists are entitled to for documentation and planning. Union members proposed increasing those hours, claiming that they’ve been stretched thin, but the company said more would have negative impacts on mental health needs. Kaiser has previously stated that it’s experienced a dramatic surge in demand for its therapy services.
But now it appears therapists and Kaiser officials have reached a compromise on that issue and others, though the tentative plan could still fail to get the necessary votes from health care workers.
While the union is tight-lipped about the agreement, the joint statement with Kaiser is an indication leadership is supporting this version of the new contract.
Matt Artz, a union spokesman, said, “We want to give our members a chance to review the agreement before announcing the terms publicly. … The tentative agreement includes gains for patients as well as for therapists.”