The Los Angeles Kaiser facility takes care of some of the sickest patients and thus the nurses feel some additional attention is needed here. There has not been a strike at the facility in over 20 years. The policies with nurse staffing according to this article are different in southern California and northern California and the strike is to attempt to bring the same elements to the south with the same management styles. 600 patients had to be transferred to other facilities in view of the strike so care would not be endangered. Kaiser does a lot of good things too and below are a couple examples. A while back I did an interview with Chris McCarthy of the Kaiser Innovation center and this looks like part of this solution might be included here as his department a while back did create a good solution for nurses, one that everyone was happy with and it had to do with patient care and the use of technology to make the jobs easier for nurses. No doubt IT will somewhere along the line come in here to provide the information and data needed for nurse staffing and requirements. The successful program was the Nurse Knowledge Exchange and the link below has more information. Staffing levels and making sure nurses are not assigned to care for patients who’s conditions are beyond the level of experience are among the concerns listed for patient safety. BD
LOS ANGELES – More than 1,000 registered nurses at Kaiser Permanente’s Los Angeles Medical Center are going on strike Wednesday – the first nursing strike at the Sunset Boulevard facility in 20 years. The 24-hour strike is designed to bring attention to an issue that the nurses care deeply about: Providing adequate staffing levels at the hospital and having protections in place so that nurses aren’t assigned to care for patients whose conditions and needs are beyond their experience.