The three-day strike by some 75,000 health care workers of the Kaiser Permanente System, the private medical system with 39 hospitals across the U.S., will be over early Saturday morning, Oct. 7, but with more protest actions pending. It is to date the most dramatic of several recent strike actions by nurses and others. This week’s protest spotlights the fact that large sections of the U.S. medical delivery system are failing. Earlier in 2023, some 14,000 nurses in New York went on strike.
The latest from the Kaiser Permanente workers is a union statement issued this morning, reviewing the core demands. There is no agreement at present with Kaiser Permanente, and talks are to be held Oct. 12 and 13. Among the issues to be addressed are the harmful effects of KP’s outsourcing of so many health care functions and jobs, which relates to the basic demands of increasing wages and fixing the extreme staff shortages.
Emergency Care: Look at the worsening situation of U.S. medical emergency departments across the U.S. Those in top “markets” (meaning where the income level is relatively higher), such as in Northern Virginia, function. But across much of the U.S., there are hours-long waits, crowding, and impossible conditions for staff as well as for patients. The average wait time in California, a ProPublica survey published in June found, was 5 hours and 34 minutes. Waits of 24 hours or longer are not uncommon in many cities. In rural areas, many counties lack any emergency department at all.
The decline in emergency treatment capacity in California was documented in a recent study for the decade 2011-2021, published in June, done by researchers in San Francisco. It was originally published on June 22 on JAMA Network, “Patterns in Patient Encounters and Emergency Department Capacity in California, 2011-2021’. The report on SciTechDaily summarized the study’s findings, in a July 26 posting: “California’s population grew by 4.2%, but the number of emergency departments in California fell from 339 to 326, while the number of hospital beds decreased by 2.5% (75,940 t0 74,052).”
While there was the decline of 4% in the number of emergency departments, “the frequency of ED visits experienced a 7.4% increase … [and] high-severity visits surged by almost 68%....” The lead author Renee U. Hsia, Professor of Emergency Medicine at UCSF, said the overcrowding is “what every health care worker already knows.”
Shortage of Basic Supplies: Even the most basic of medical care supplies are showing recurrent shortages around the country. A medical staffer at a skilled care residential facility in Maryland reported to EIR that there are shortages of basic supplies and equipment needed for the daily care of patients. These include blood pressure machines that also do pulse and temperature, which are all in disrepair, no thermometers and shortages of ordered bandages, and medicated dressing materials that are used for open wounds that need packing. “Usually the ordered items are unavailable, and the nurses have to use their own judgment and pack with what is available,” the source said. “We use our own personally owned equipment for vital signs, even on COVID and other infection patients.” Housekeeping staff aren’t even allowed to use anti-viral wipes to clean tables “because they are expensive,” despite the fact that there are patients testing positive for COVID in the building.
