News of the Month — December 2021
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NUHW members Laura Nakamura and Domonique Trotter are featured in a KTVU story about how the 2014 affiliation between UCSF and Children’s Hospital Oakland has resulted in reduced services in the East Bay.
In a story by Kaiser Health News, NUHW said there has been an “explosion” of queries from healthcare workers in the past year interested in unionizing, as they fight for better, safer working conditions during the pandemic.
NUHW’s November 19 sympathy strike in Northern California with Kaiser engineers and march to the company’s Oakland headquarters was included in stories by LA Progressive and Liberation News highlighting NUHW’s fight for mental health parity and the healthcare giant’s turn against unions in recent years.
Top Class Actions reported Kaiser Healthcare will pay $11.5 million to settle claims it discriminated against African-American employees who worked in California between January 2015 and March 2021 and were denied equal pay, bonuses, and promotions.
Brius-owned Northpointe Healthcare Centre in Fresno was fined $912,2014 due to several patient care violations, but the large penalty and similar actions against other facilities were never made public, Cal Matters reported. ABC10 also indicated that California nursing homes filed 433 appeals to the state health department since 2016 over citations involving patient harm or threats of harm, with the state downgrading more than 600 of the 3,000 citations issued.
A total of 25 percent of youth have experienced depressive symptoms and 20 percent report anxiety symptoms during the pandemic, as the U.S. Surgeon General issued a public health advisory on the mental challenges confronting youth due to a surge in suicide attempts among adolescents, Los Angeles Times reported.