Our proposals to the National Union of Healthcare Workers seek greater flexibility so patients can more easily access the right care at the right time.
Kaiser Permanente and the National Union of Healthcare Workers met on Tuesday, August 26, to continue negotiating a new agreement for our Northern California mental health and addiction medicine professionals.
We remain focused on bargaining in good faith with NUHW leaders to reach an agreement that supports our employees and our members.
Our contract proposals presented on Tuesday support the evolution of our mental health delivery model and our need for greater flexibility to help patients easily access the right care at the right time — directly with our clinicians or through our external network.
The union made proposals that would reduce the flexibility we need to ensure timely access to care for our patients. Several aspects of their proposals included language that implied the union has a role in holding Kaiser Permanente accountable to legal and regulatory requirements. We are accountable to meet our compliance obligations and do not need this in our contract.
Our bargaining teams spent considerable time discussing these proposals with the union bargaining team and reviewing them in preparation for this session. Ultimately, we rejected these proposals because they were redundant or did not support the goal of ensuring the right care at the right time for our patients.
By contrast, on Tuesday, our bargaining team presented 3 proposals applying to individual/family psychotherapy in Adult and Child Psychiatry and aimed at ensuring we can meet our obligations to make high-quality mental health care available to our patients while also supporting our employees.
The implementation of SB 221 in 2022, which required that patients receive a return mental health or substance use disorder appointment within 10 days, was a challenge in its early implementation. Thanks to an expanded care network, return appointments are now being scheduled at rates that exceed regulatory requirements, ensuring timely follow-up care for patients and reducing the need for clinicians to protect allocation of new and returning patients.
To create further flexibility, particularly during a nationwide shortage of mental health professionals, our proposal eliminates the new to returning patient ratio of 1-to-5 in the current contract.
Our goal is to adapt our staffing model to manage patient workflows more effectively. The current ratio requirement is unnecessary and can cause delays in scheduling patient appointments. We are confident that this more open approach better serves the interests of our patients and our clinicians based on our experience in other parts of our mental health care practice, including Southern California.
We fully understand that clinicians need designated time to thoughtfully manage and prepare for patients — prepping for appointments and group curriculum, responding to patient messages, communicating with social service agencies, and consulting with colleagues on clinical questions.
Our proposal reserves time for these tasks, enables our clinicians to reserve more time for patient appointments, and gives clinicians more discretion in how they manage their practice. It aligns more closely with the allocation of time employed successfully in Southern California.
We are committed to continually improving our model of care to meet rapidly increasing demand for mental health services and our members’ changing needs and expectations. The existing contract restricts our ability to evolve our model of care to anticipate members’ needs and meet their expectations. Our proposal removes these constraints while continuing to meet or exceed all legal and regulatory standards. This expanded flexibility will also provide more continuity in the patient caseloads our clinicians manage and, where appropriate, allow us to leverage our trusted network.
We look forward to continuing negotiations on Thursday, August 28, and will continue to engage in good faith.
Our goal is to reach an agreement that is beneficial for our members, patients, and clinicians, and we are focused on doing what is best to ensure timely access to excellent mental health care.
For more information, visit kp.org/nuhwbargaining.