ALAMEDA COUNTY — Medical workers protest staff cuts
More than 500 walk off the job at hospitals, clinics
Kelly St. John, Chronicle Staff Writer, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Tuesday, August 31, 2004

More than 500 nurses and other health-care workers walked off the job for a day Monday in a noisy protest of planned cuts and layoffs at Alameda County's financially troubled medical center and clinic system.

The 24-hour walkout, which began at midnight Sunday, did not shutter the emergency room at Highland Hospital in Oakland. But the unions' actions forced health officials to cancel elective surgeries and close the county's nonemergency health clinics, said Michael Brown, spokesman for the Alameda County Medical Center. All clinics will be reopened today, he said.

All doctors and one-fourth of the 140 nurses scheduled to work showed up for their regular shifts, Brown said. With the help of visiting nurses, they successfully cared for 120 patients already admitted to Highland Hospital. Care for 150 inpatients at the John George Psychiatric Pavilion and Fairmont Hospital in San Leandro was also not compromised, he said.

Still, Monday brought noisy protests. Hundreds of striking workers from Service Employees International Union locals 250, 535 and 616 crowded the sidewalk near the emergency room's entrance at Oakland's Highland Hospital on Monday morning, chanting and waving picket signs as sheriff's deputies and police officers looked on. Smaller groups also picketed other county medical facilities.

They said the county's plan to cut some 200 to 300 jobs, as recommended by a consultant to the hospital, Cambio Health Solutions of Brentwood, Tenn., would jeopardize the county's safety net. They said the walkout was a last resort measure to call attention to the cuts' severity.

"Oakland might as well just start putting out body bags for people if they plan to make cuts like this to the emergency room staff," said Barbara Wilson, a registered nurse at Highland Hospital.

Amy Raff-Heynssens, a critical-care nurse and member of the medical center's trauma team, criticized the hospital's 18-month, $3.2 million contract with the management consulting firm Cambio as a bloated waste of money during a time of fiscal crisis.

Raff-Heynssens also questioned why drastic cuts were needed after the county's voters in March approved Measure A, a half-cent sales tax that is expected to generate $70 million for the Alameda County Medical Center system. The tax came after the county was forced to close two clinics.

But funds from the tax are already accounted for because the medical center system has been running such large deficits, said Gail Steele, president of the county Board of Supervisors, which oversees the medical center's trustees.

The medical center already owes about $200 million in county loans in recent years, Steele said. This year, the medical center is proposing its first balanced budget in three years, she said.

"The medical center is deeply in debt, and they have to make hard decisions to get out of that," said Steele, who noted that the county has to cut other vital programs from libraries to law enforcement. "(The unions) are right that they don't have the staff, but it has to be a balanced budget."

But Christal Cox, 49, a charge nurse who has worked at the hospital for 18 years and was walking the picket line Monday, said the proposed cuts would stress a staff that is already stretched too thin.

She said that although charge nurses are supposed to be supervisors only, she is being assigned her own patients and other duties, at risk to patients.

"We're already understaffed," Cox said. "When I tell (my) supervisors, they all ignore me."

Brown said staff cuts are necessary because 70 percent of the medical center's revenues go to the cost of employees in salaries and benefits, a higher rate than other public hospitals.

He said Cambio made the recommendation for layoffs because the medical center has a higher ratio of staff to patients than it did five years ago.

"We want patient volumes to grow. But it is not wise to overstaff until they do," he said.

E-mail Kelly St. John at kstjohn@sfchronicle.com.