Please join us today in honoring Sister Evelyn Lynch, RN who was injured on the job at Brookdale University Hospital, after repeated citations from OSHA. She is still recovering from her injuries. SEIU 1199 New York is hosting a prayer service tonight at 5:00 PM EST. Let us stand together today and pray to end the violence now.
When we set out to get a Cal/OSHA workplace violence prevention regulation in place to cover all healthcare workers in the state of California, many people said it would be 10 years or more before we saw anything like that. Some said it was just flat out impossible. Our response then was the same as it is today: We will not only get this done, we will do it in less than 4 years … and guess what? We are right on target!
This past year, we’ve gone from submitting our petition to the Cal/OSHA Standards Board, to having it accepted, to moving quickly into the process of getting the actual regulation written. Along the way, we’ve educated, mobilized, and organized around the hazard of workplace violence in the healthcare industry.
We are now in the first weeks of our third full year of the campaign and we believe that a draft of the regulation will go to the Cal/OSHA Standards Board by the first week of June. They will then take a few months to review that language and bring it to committee and public comment before voting. The good news is that Governor Brown signed into law SB 1299 requiring Cal/OSHA to have a workplace violence prevention regulation for healthcare workers promulgated by June 2016 (a law that we were successful in amending to ensure that the scope of our regulation would not be limited).
We hit the ground running in 2015. We anticipate reviewing the first draft of the regulation very soon and are coordinating a task force of healthcare workers to do a first read with us. (If you are interested in being part of that group, please email or call Richard at 626-375-6426.)
Aside from working on the regulation itself, we are gearing up for two actions that will coincide around Workers Memorial Day – one in the Los Angeles area and one in Sacramento. When we have the details in place, we’ll post the information here.For now, save the dates of April 29 (Los Angeles) and May 6 (Sacramento) for these “Safe Workers Save Lives” actions.
Finally, Cal/OSHA’s next meeting about the regulation is scheduled for Thursday, February 5, at the Caltrans Building (100 South Main Street) in Los Angeles. This will be a critical meeting for everyone to attend because it is to discuss the first draft of the regulation. Please save the date and email Kathy to let us know you’ll be there.
On November 13, more than 30 healthcare workers and union staff from Service Employees International Union Locals 121RN, 1021, 1000, and United Long Term Care Workers joined in solidarity with representatives from the United Nurses Association of California, the California Nurses Association, the California Teachers Association, Worksafe, and the California American Nurses Association at the second Cal/OSHA Workplace Violence in Healthcare advisory meeting in Oakland.
This was one in a series of public stakeholder meetings being held by Cal/OSHA to develop the country’s first comprehensive workplace violence prevention regulation for healthcare workers. The focus of this meeting was to discuss workplace violence and prevention mechanisms as they relate to non-hospital healthcare settings.
It is clear that the mechanisms of prevention – when it comes to the hazard of workplace violence – will be different from one work environment to the next. What will work at San Quentin simply may not be suitable for what is needed at College Hospital Cerritos, for example.
When the Chairs of the meeting asked about what takes place at non-hospital settings, they heard about an incident where a nurse in a prison, attempting to give meds to her patient through a door-slide, was assaulted when her patient threw feces and urine all over her. They also heard about a home healthcare worker who had to lock herself in with her patient in the bathroom of the home she was visiting because the parents of the patient were being violent with one another.
There is no shortage of these stories, regardless of the settings in which healthcare workers perform their duties, and they are propelling the California Safe Care Standard campaign on a fast track whereby we will definitely have a regulation in place no later than the summer of 2016.
“It is important to realize that many of these state regulations can take upwards of ten years to put in place. The fact that we will see our workplace violence prevention standard in place in about three years from start to finish is a testament to how critical this issue this, and to the readiness with which workers are willing to share their harrowing experiences with the hazard and the risks associated with the hazard,” said Richard Negri, SEIU Local 121RN Health and Safety Director and co-lead of the campaign.
Thank you to everyone who went to Oakland to be part of this historic regulatory-making process. Up next is a sub-committee meeting on Wednesday, November 19 on security issues. For more information, email us.
By Richard Negri, Health and Safety Director, SEIU Local 121RN
There were a few themes yesterday, November 19, at the Cal/OSHA advisory meeting on workplace violence prevention in healthcare, and some were more startling than others. The purpose of these meetings is for stakeholders to publicly discuss what they believe should or should not be in the regulation, a draft of which Cal/OSHA says will be shared by January or February of next year.
The meeting was set up as a panel discussion led primarily by representatives of employer security staff and law enforcement who echoed each other’s sentiment that security is “everyone’s responsibility.” Healthcare workers and workers’ rights advocates repeatedly reminded the panelists and other stakeholders of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which states that it is the employer’s responsibility to provide a safe workplace for their employees.
The argument that security is “everyone’s responsibility” was also met with the reality that many workers who act on health and safety hazards on the job – who intervene, complain, file a report, and so on – are often disciplined or retaliated against by the very management who are laying the responsibility for our security on us. To highlight this, a story was shared about a nurse who intervened to assist another healthcare worker who was about to get hurt in a violent situation. The nurse was able to control the hazard, the aggressor was calmed down and, in the end, no one was hurt. That nurse who intervened got written up by management and then was suspended.
The issue of training was also discussed at length. We need and want training. However, training should not be with the expectation that we are then to act as our own security team. Healthcare workers are not security personnel – we should not be approaching patients to frisk them, wand them, or anything of the sort. As one nurse said, “patients and their families are already scared of us because they or their loved ones are sick and to put more barriers of distrust between them and us, who are there to provide healthcare, has to stop.”
We reminded the law enforcement representatives that if any of them were to get kicked, spit at, punched, stabbed, or worse, the perpetrator would be facing some serious charges, and some of those very perpetrators are brought to our ERs that serve as “holding cells” where we are expected to give quality healthcare.Cost was predictably an issue for employer representatives. A California Hospital Association spokesperson said that some hospitals are very small and can’t afford adequate security, and we had to remind her that healthcare workers in these facilities don’t give less quality healthcare because of an institution’s financial status. An industry that has $243 million to spend on lobbying in Washington, D.C. in one year alone really has no business complaining about low cost administrative and engineering controls that would make its workplaces safer for its workers and the populations they serve.
At the end of the day, it was a robust and informative meeting. Cal/OSHA did a fantastic job in chairing the discussion, and workers, advocates, and activists again moved the discussion to reality-based issues as opposed to spin-doctored messaging that does everything and anything but control the hazard of violence on the job.
Cal/OSHA was very clear in stating that they need and want to hear from anyone who has something to be shared around workplace violence in healthcare settings. They want to consider each and every angle as they begin drafting this regulation. You should be empowered to get heard on this issue by emailing Bob Nakamura at Cal/OSHA or, if you prefer, me, and I will forward your message along.
