Nurses, workers launch 5-day strike at three HCA-owned hospitals

More than 2,400 nurses, therapists, pharmacists and lab techs on Wednesday launched a Thanksgiving holiday strike at three HCA Healthcare-owned hospitals.

Corina Haney was among those planning to picket the day before the holiday.

Haney said while she’s dedicated to improving her patients’ lives, inadequate staffing has undermined her work as a nurse in the burn unit at West Hills Hospital.

“I’ve seen patients having to wait up to six hours to get their dressings changed,” the 45-year-old Simi Valley resident said. “It’s devastating to me.”

Chronic understaffing, they say, is putting patients and employees at risk.

Workers participating in the five-day walkout at Riverside Community Hospital, West Hills Hospital, and Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks are represented by SEIU 121RN.

Their labor contract expired in September and was extended to Oct. 24, but the two sides have yet to reach an agreement. The strike is scheduled to end at 7 a.m. Monday, Nov. 27.

“Nurses are leaving in droves at all three facilities,” Haney said. “We’ve lost over 100 nurses at West Hills in the last year. It’s directly related to the staffing crisis.”

In a statement issued Wednesday, HCA spokeswoman Carmella Gutierrez said the healthcare giant is “disappointed by SEIU 121RN leadership’s decision to strike,” given the effort HCA has invested in bargaining since May.

“It’s evident the labor union has not taken these sessions seriously and has intended to strike all along, despite our genuine attempts at finding common ground,” she said.

Gutierrez said HCA is drawing on the resources of its nationwide healthcare system to ensure each hospital is fully operational.

“Our doors will remain open throughout any labor union activities,” she said. “And importantly, there will be no closure of any services at this time.”

Wielding picket signs reading, “Safe staffing saves lives!” and “Patients can’t wait!” picketers walked outside the three hospitals, with an estimated 150 picketers at West Hills and more than 500 in Riverside.

SEIU officials said many units at the hospitals have replaced “patient sitters” — employees who monitor patients and intervene to prevent falls and other injuries — with virtual sitters who watch patients on a video monitor.

They can only give verbal instructions, often to patients who are confused or facing pain and crisis, the union said. Nurses say the virtual system is woefully inadequate to help patients who can inadvertently or intentionally harm themselves.

A report released by SEIU earlier this year found that HCA staffs its hospitals 30% below the national average.

Meghan Meyer, an ICU nurse at Riverside Community Hospital, recently said understaffing at her facility worsened when the hospital outsourced its telephone operator jobs to a Las Vegas call center. They are responsible for answering the switchboard and paging medical staff to other areas of the hospital during emergencies.

“When we call a code for a patient being in distress, these people don’t know where the various rooms in the hospital are, so they can’t tell us where to go,” Meyer said. “And we often hear long delays between the time we call in a code and when we hear an overhead page for a rapid-response team.”

Nurses also say workplace violence training and hospital security aren’t keeping up with the threats they face on a daily basis, while management has resisted the call for improvements.

Instead of listening to frontline nurses, HCA has retaliated against union leaders and engaged in a campaign of disinformation about the strike, SEIU said.

HCA Healthcare operates 182 hospitals and more than 2,300 medical centers in 20 states and the United Kingdom.