Kaiser workers, patients protest wait times

Kaiser Permanente therapists, social workers and patients from throughout the Bay Area gathered in front of the health care nonprofit’s Oakland headquarters Saturday to call for more providers and shorter patient wait times, which they say can be a month or longer between appointments.

About 50 to 60 people, many in red National Union of Healthcare Workers shirts and holding picket signs urging “Kaiser, don’t deny my patients mental health care,” marched from the company’s headquarters on Kaiser Plaza to the Lake Merritt Pergola.

They were joined by patients like Greta Christina, who said she has sought treatment for depression with the health care behemoth.

“Until I needed mental health care, I really liked Kaiser,” Christina said.

When she has access to therapy, she said, she gets better.

But right now, she’s lucky if she can get one appointment a month, and in the meantime she goes through days struggling to leave the house or even get out of bed. Her depression has taken a toll on her, as well as her friends and

family, she said. And she relies on whatever self-help techniques she can find.

“I’m doing what I can,” Christina said. “It’s better than not doing it, but it’s not real care.”

Ann Rivello, a Kaiser therapist in Redwood City, said long waits between appointments are driven in large part by a lack of providers. She has worked for the company for eight years, she said, and has seen the work conditions decline over that time. She said she saw two new patients Friday and had to tell them she won’t be able to see them again until December.

“The saddest part is most people don’t even get upset,” she said.

Therapists are expected to see 10 patients a day, Rivello said, compared with therapists in private practice, who generally see six or fewer. Sessions are usually about 50 minutes each, which doesn’t leave a lot of time in the workday for things such as checking in on other patients or followups.

And, she added, it’s possible more potential patients are out there who aren’t even trying to get an appointment because of the wait times.

“We see a lot of patients with depression who get discouraged and don’t come back,” she said.

In a statement urging the health care workers’ union to accept the company’s latest contract offer, John Nelson, Kaiser’s vice president of communications, said the company had offered providers “highly competitive wages and benefits and professional development opportunities.”

“We have made significant progress to address the national crisis in mental health care: we’ve hired hundreds of new therapists; we are building dozens of new treatment facilities; and we are investing millions of dollars to help more people enter the mental health professions,” he said.

But Kathy Ray, a psychiatric social worker with the child and family unit in Walnut Creek, said the care provided by the company is still not up to what she wants to see. Clinicians are required to do a 30-minute intake phone call with new patients within 10 days. Then, the patients have to wait about two weeks for their first appointment. By that point, they may have been waiting a month or longer to see a provider.

Then, Ray said, “the next appointment is in a month or six weeks or maybe eight weeks.”

Sometimes the practitioners see patients only after they’ve reached a critical stage, rather than when practitioners could still provide preventive care — something Ray said is supposed to be a key tenet of Kaiser’s health care model.

Ray said the heavy workloads and frustrations with poor patient care have resulted in significant turnover in the staffing of Kaiser’s mental health units, sometimes as high as 25%.

Rivello said sometimes therapists leave because they’d rather work somewhere that has lower pay but they feel they can really take care of their patients.

Ray pointed to news such as a branding deal Kaiser struck to name the area around the Chase Center, the Warriors’ new San Francisco arena, with the tagline “Thrive City,” a project that reports say Kaiser could pay as much as $295 million. That money, she said, could instead have been spent on hiring more therapists and social workers.

“We don’t do the ‘Thrive’ part” when it comes to mental health care services, Ray said.

“I have a real commitment to my patients,” she said. “Kaiser has the money to do better than they are doing.”