March 14th, 2024
Kaiser therapists win fight for more reception support
In Kaiser’s Sacramento region, therapists aren’t just successfully advocating for themselves, they’re advocating for their support staff. At clinics in Sacramento, Folsom and Roseville, Kaiser had stopped providing consistent reception and frontline support. That didn’t sit well with therapists who understand that having support staff on hand can help patients who might be anxious about […]
March 14th, 2024
NUHW investigation sparks complaint against Kaiser
In recent years, it’s become clear that Kaiser Permanente treats its mental health clinicians and patients worse in Southern California than in Northern California. Despite Kaiser’s chronic understaffing and documented parity violations, its Southern California management team has insisted on paying clinicians lower salaries with poorer benefits, while illegally cutting Patient Management Time and refusing […]
March 14th, 2024
NUHW is sponsoring two mental health equity bills
NUHW is helping make 2024 a monumental year in the fight for mental health equity. In January, we worked with allies in the State Assembly to pass Assembly Bill 236, authored by Chris Holden, that would put an end to Ghost Networks by requiring health plans to maintain accurate lists of in-network providers. Now, NUHW […]
March 14th, 2024
RNs make Kaiser address failed call center rollout
When Kaiser introduced a regional call center that left psychiatric nurses inundated with messages and patients potentially waiting too long for care, the nurses successfully organized to demand improvements. Until last summer, Kaiser had local call centers for psychiatric nurses that operated well. But in a bid to save money through consolidation, Kaiser rolled out […]
March 14th, 2024
Model of Care committees further NorCal contract wins
The five Model of Care Committees in Northern California completed their work recently with strong gains for clinicians and overall patient care. Among the biggest victories are more Indirect Patient Care Time/Patient Management Time for intake clinicians, more time to conduct child intakes, more treatment tracks to ease the burden of generalists and crisis care […]