Strikes at University of California hospitals statewide

Second strike in 6 months at UCLA Medical Center
Some UC Hospital Workers To Participate In 1-Day Strike Wednesday
CBS Local News
Nov 20, 2013

Hundreds of replacement workers will fill in for workers on strike. Dr. Tom Rosenthal, the chief medical officer ...


LAST MAY:

UCLA Chief Medical Officer Says Strike Is About Pensions, Not Patient Care
May 21, 2013
WESTWOOD (CBSLA.com) — As a two-day strike began Tuesday at five of the biggest medical centers in the University of California system, medical workers say they are protesting low staffing levels and patient care, while officials contend that the strike is about pensions.

Thousands of union medical workers walked picket lines throughout the state, including at UC Irvine and the Westwood and Santa Monica campuses of UCLA Medical Center. The strike officially began at 4a.m. Tuesday morning.

The strike comes after nearly a year of stalled contract negotiations with UC administrators. Striking workers said they are protesting a range of issues, including patient care and current staffing levels.

“I am here for my patients, I’m really concerned about their safety,” said radiation therapist Jenny Takakura, who administers radiation to cancer patients.

“We’ve had three therapists that have left, and each time they’ve left they have not been replaced,” she said.

UCLA Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tom Rosenthal said there are no issues with patient care...

[Maura Larkins comment: In fact, there are issues with patient care at UCLA, but they are hushed up. UCLA achieves this by working with other medical centers. UCLA hushes up other hospitals' problems, thus making sure other hospitals aren't motivated to improve, and keeping UCLA's reputation among the best. In fact, the grading is on a curve, so laziness and greed are allowed free rein.]



"The union representing patient care and service employees at UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica held a strike last Wednesday. Strikes took place at each of the University of California hospitals statewide on the same day."

UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital Workers Participate In Strike
Parimal M. Rohit
Santa Monica Mirror
Nov. 29, 2013

For the second time in almost six months, some workers from the Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center participated in a one-day strike last week.

The Nov. 20 strike, coordinated by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3299, took place at each of the University of California hospitals statewide, including the UCLA-run facilities both in Santa Monica and in Westwood.

All hospitals remained open, with elective surgeries directly impacted by the one-day walkout, according to news reports.

Similar to the two-day strike at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and other University of California hospitals in May, elective surgeries scheduled for Nov. 20 were reportedly rescheduled.

Union officials and the workers participating in the strike made demands for increased staffing, pay raises, and updated pension plans.

According to a statement released by UCLA Health, 325 replacement workers filled in for those who joined the picket line. Some administration staff members were “redeployed” to substitute for a variety of workers ranging from housekeeping staff to respiratory therapists and nursing assistants, according to UCLA Health.

“We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this strike may cause our patients and their families and friends,” UCLA Hospital System’s chief medical officer Dr. Tom Rosenthal said in a released statement prior to the strike. “However, every effort is being made to ensure that the hospitals and clinics that are part of the UCLA Health System remain open and continue to deliver the highest level of patient care.”

In all, 20 percent of elected surgeries scheduled during the one-day strike were rescheduled.

It was estimated the one-day strike would cost the entire UCLA Health System $2.5 million, including lost revenue and compensation for replacement workers.

AFSCME represents about 22,000 patient care and service employees. About 3,800 of those employees work for the UCLA Health System.

Despite the strike, UCLA Health said approximately 75 percent of AFSCME employees still showed up for work.

Also on the picket line alongside AFSCME Local 3299 members were representatives of other unions representing teaching assistants, lecturers, librarians, nurses, and healthcare and research employees at the University of California.

A similar strike took place May 21 and 22, when nearly 30,000 people participated in a two-day strike at University of California hospitals across the state. Members of the second labor union, University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE), joined the two-day strike in solidarity.

At Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, more than 100 hospital employees lined Wilshire Boulevard and 16th Street during the two-day strike last May in an effort to increase staffing, update pension plans, and demand raises.

In September, AFSCME Local 3299 filed a complaint with the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) and alleged representatives on behalf of the Regents of the University of California engaged in intimidation practices against hospital workers during the two-day strike in May.

Specifically, the complaint charged the Regents of the University of California with threatening “adverse action against employees for participating in a strike,” listing three scenarios where a UC representative allegedly singled out an employee to be terminated or reprimanded if they took part in the two-day walkout in May.

The Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center is a 267-bed facility located at 16th Street and Wilshire Boulevard.


Strike news update at UCLA
By UCLA Newsroom
November 20, 2013

An estimated 230 UCLA service employees represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) did not report to work on Wednesday. Among them are cooks and food service workers, landscaping crews and custodial staff. (Staff at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center are separate.)

To minimize the impact on campus operations, supervisors prioritized tasks, performed some duties and utilized temporary replacement workers.

In dining facilities operated by Housing and Hospital Services, meals were simplified. Four facilities representing about 30 percent of the operation were closed for the day: Bruin Plate, Feast at Rieber, Hedrick Test Kitchen and Café 1919.

Custodial service in on-campus housing was prioritized around the cleaning of restrooms and removal of refuse from living areas.

Cleaning priorities for other campus buildings were focused on the highest-demand classrooms, restrooms, libraries. UCLA attempted to provide some minimum amount of service to all buildings on Wednesday.

Landscaping crews focused on trash removal and key campus areas.

How UCLA's Millionaire Doctor/public employee David Feinberg got $1.3 million amid tuition hikes, budget cuts and a recession

Dr. David Feinberg

[Maura Larkins comment: Both Dr. Feinberg and Chancellor Gene Block are psychiatry professors. A lawsuit has been filed against yet another professor of psychiatry at UCLA. Dr. Alexander Bystritsky is accused of causing the wrongful death of a woman by giving her dangerous medications in order to make her feel happy and to believe she was cured of her illness, causing her to give a large donation to UCLA.

What kind of ethics does Dr. David Feinberg have? What's he going to do with all this money? I'm guessing it's not all going to scholarships for students who can't pay tuition at UCLA.]


UCLA's Millionaire Doctor David Feinberg
How Feinberg got $1.3 million amid tuition hikes, budget cuts and a recession
By Beth Barrett
LA Weekly
Mar 31 2011

Last year, when Stanford Hospital & Clinics was considering poaching Dr. David Feinberg from UCLA, where he is the associate vice chancellor and CEO of its public hospital system, the university brass and the powerful UC Board of Regents decided to do whatever was required to keep their golden administrator.

Things were bad at UCLA when the feverish bid to retain Feinberg broke out. It had just been slammed with $60 million in academic program cuts by the deficit-riddled state of California, and faces another $96 million bite on July 1. In a series of recent hikes, the university raised average student tuition 40 percent from about $7,000 to more than $11,000.

More tuition hikes were coming, and the university owed its employees $21.5 billion in future pension payments that it had no clear-cut way to pay.

But the vast Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, a public nonprofit, had experienced a financially robust previous year under Feinberg, and the facility in 2009 enjoyed high patient-satisfaction rankings as usual. Despite California's stubborn recession, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block — like Feinberg, a psychiatry professor at the School of Medicine — decided to make his colleague a staggering offer: He would nearly double Feinberg's $739,695 base salary to $1.33 million.

That included a 22 percent pay raise of $160,300 and an annual "retention bonus" of $250,000 paid every year that Feinberg does not leave for another job. Block also decided to continue Feinberg's "incentive bonus," which had hit $210,739 in the previous fiscal year.

There was nothing else quite like Block's offer elsewhere in California's university medical schools. The next highest paid is UC San Francisco's CEO Mark Laret. San Francisco, like UCLA, is a top facility, ranked seventh in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, close behind No. 5 UCLA.

In 2010, Laret's $739,700 pay was reduced as a result of the systemwide pay cuts. But with an "incentive" bonus of $176,912 and a car allowance of $8,916, he earned $876,215. Now, suddenly Feinberg was in line to earn nearly half a million dollars more than Laret.

On June 30, Feinberg will begin getting his annual quarter-million-dollar bonus simply for not leaving for another job.

Feinberg's juicy pay package led to uncomfortable headlines for UCLA on Sept. 17, the day after the Board of Regents approved it.

Then, in late December, Feinberg earned UCLA another round of unwanted media attention. The San Francisco Chronicle obtained a private Dec. 9 letter in which Feinberg and 35 other executives in the UC system lashed out at the Board of Regents. The highly compensated group weren't demanding help for academic programs and students. They were threatening to sue the struggling California universities if the regents didn't boost the executives' long-standing $245,000 salary caps used to calculate their pensions.

The change would create a sizable pension boost, costing the universities $5.1 million per year — for just 36 government employees. In addition, the 36 executives insisted the new pension deal be retroactive to 2007, taking from the universities an additional bite of $51 million.

In the letter, Feinberg and the others wrote that it was "the University's legal, moral and ethical obligation" to hand over the pension boosts. They also threatened, "Failure to do so will likely result in a costly and unsuccessful legal confrontation," and emphasized that they were writing "URGENTLY."

The letter, which proved to be deeply embarrassing to UC officials and the regents, was widely assumed to have been leaked by a UC university system insider disgusted by the demands.

The demands from the 36 were a direct political challenge to UC President Mark Yudof, who had publicly opposed bigger pensions for university executives. The University of California system owes $21.6 billion in future pension payments to all its retirees — but it hasn't got the money, and doesn't know where it's going to get it. Yudof is pursuing fiscal reforms to raise the missing billions, including upping the retirement age for future employees from age 60 to 65 for maximum pension benefits — and, once again, raising student tuition and fees.

The leaked letter enraged students, critics of cushy government pensions and salaries and incoming Gov. Jerry Brown, who is a nonvoting member of the Board of Regents.

Brown opined in the Chronicle in December: "These executives seem very out of touch at a time when the state is contemplating billions of dollars in reductions that will affect people who are far less advantaged."

In early January, under a media spotlight, Block opposed the pension boosts, and the demand was not approved by the regents.

But three weeks later, without a formal vote, the regents — who include such notables as investment banker Richard C. Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Sherry L. Lansing, former chair/CEO of Paramount Pictures — found a way to give Feinberg and other UC system medical center executives statewide a different costly reward: "incentive" bonuses totaling $2.6 million that had been deferred from 2009.

Feinberg topped the bonus recipient list, raking in $218,728.

The popular doctor now has critics aplenty. Students, facing further tuition hikes as Gov. Brown struggles with a massive deficit, are flabbergasted at the Wall Street–like disparity between how the UC system treats its highfliers versus its students.

Student Matt Margolis, president of the Bruin Democrats, says thousands of UC, California State University and community college students "have to take quarters off, drop classes, get kicked out of their housing." For UC leaders "to respond to the need to scale back by cutting the budget and raising tuition — I don't see how that sits well with the CEO of the medical center having his salary doubled...

UCLA hospitals to pay $865,500 for breaches of celebrities' privacy

UCLA hospitals to pay $865,500 for breaches of celebrities' privacy
July 08, 2011
By Molly Hennessy-Fiske
Los Angeles Times

UCLA Health System has agreed to pay $865,500 as part of a settlement with federal regulators announced Thursday after two celebrity patients alleged that hospital employees broke the law and reviewed their medical records without authorization.

Federal and hospital officials declined to identify the celebrities involved. The complaints cover 2005 to 2009, a time during which hospital employees were repeatedly caught and fired for peeping at the medical records of dozens of celebrities, including Britney Spears, Farrah Fawcett and then-California First Lady Maria Shriver.

Violations allegedly occurred at all three UCLA Health System hospitals — Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital and Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, according to UCLA spokeswoman Dale Tate.

The security breaches were first reported in The Times in 2008.

The violations led state legislators to pass a law imposing escalating fines on hospitals for patient privacy lapses.

After the law took effect on Jan. 1, 2009, state regulators fined Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center $95,000 in connection with privacy breaches that year that sources said involved the medical records of Michael Jackson, who was taken to the hospital after his death in June 2009.

The same month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights began investigating alleged violations of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act at the hospitals, according to the settlement agreement.

Investigators found that UCLA employees examined private electronic records "repeatedly and without a permissible reason" in 2005 and 2008, including an employee in the nursing director's office, according to the agreement reached Wednesday.

The employee was not named in the agreement, and the hospital spokeswoman declined to identify who it was. But the timing and description of the alleged violations cited in the agreement suggest that it may have been Lawanda Jackson, an administrative specialist at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center who was fired in 2007 after she was caught accessing Farrah Fawcett's medical records and allegedly selling information to the National Enquirer.

Jackson later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of violating federal medical privacy laws for commercial purposes but died of cancer before she could be sentenced. Fawcett died of cancer in 2009.

Federal investigators faulted the hospital system for failing to remedy the problems, discipline or retrain staff.

"Employees must clearly understand that casual review for personal interest of patients' protected health information is unacceptable and against the law," Georgina Verdugo, director of the Office for Civil Rights, said in a statement Thursday, adding that healthcare facilities "will be held accountable for employees who access protected health information to satisfy their own personal curiosity."

As a condition of the settlement, UCLA Health System was required to submit a plan to federal regulators detailing how officials would prevent future breaches. They agreed to retrain staff on privacy protections, formulate privacy policies, appoint a monitor to oversee improvements and report to regulators for the next three years.

UCLA Health System released a statement Thursday noting that, "Over the past three years, we have worked diligently to strengthen our staff training, implement enhanced data security systems and increase our auditing capabilities."

"Our patients' health, privacy and well-being are of paramount importance to us," said Dr. David T. Feinberg, chief executive of the UCLA Hospital System. "We appreciate the involvement and recommendations made by OCR in this matter and will fully comply with the plan of correction it has formulated. We remain vigilant and proactive to ensure that our patients' rights continue to be protected at all times."