Sacramento mayor will mediate negotiations between Kaiser, striking mental health clinicians
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg will mediate negotiations between Kaiser Permanente and the National Union of Health Care Workers, which represents roughly 2,000 mental health clinicians who have been on strike for nearly 10 weeks.
During a rally Friday in Oakland, NUHW President Sal Rosselli announced that the union agreed to work with Steinberg to try and settle a key issue that has bogged down negotiations. Rosselli said he had just left a two-hour meeting with Steinberg where he introduced himself as, not the mayor of Sacramento nor as former president pro tem of the California Senate, but as the individual who spearheaded state legislative efforts that put billions of dollars into mental health care for California communities.
“I hope within days we come to a resolution,” Rosselli said. “Our hope is a tentative agreement, and that tentative agreement must include a fundamental change in the relationship, where Kaiser executives agreed to collaborate with you, with our clinicians, to finally fix the behavioral health system.”
The company and union have been at odds over how much time therapists should have to take care of patients’ needs outside therapy sessions. Mental health providers have said that, in addition to putting their notes in Kaiser’s system, they often must connect patients with other resources and use the tools of their profession to assess a patient’s conditions.
In a statement released Friday afternoon, Kaiser officials said they were committed to reaching an agreement that met patients’ needs.
“After much back and forth, we are at a point where, to move this forward and find a solution, we need an independent, third-party mediator,” company officials said in the statement. “We are pleased that NUHW has agreed to join with us in this. We proposed, and NUHW agreed, to ask Mayor Steinberg to mediate our contract negotiations.”
The mayor’s representatives did not immediately comment. Steinberg has been meeting with both sides today.
Rosselli also noted that it was Steinberg who helped to negotiate a tentative deal in 2015 as NUHW prepared to go into an open-ended strike.
Therapists, represented by the National Union of Health Care Workers, said Kaiser members routinely wait months to see their clients in Sacramento and elsewhere around Northern California after an initial intake session to assess their needs.
Kaiser members also have contacted The Bee to share how long waits for treatment affected them or their family members, saying they felt trapped in a “circle of horror” because contracted therapists on the company-provided lists were either not seeing new patients or didn’t have the credentials to treat them.
This story was originally published October 14, 2022 at 1:22 PM.
