For Immediate Release: November 17, 2023 
Contact: Hal Weiss (213) 247-4585 | weissh@seiu121rn.org

Nurses and Healthcare Professionals at three Southern California HCA hospitals to launch Thanksgiving holiday strike.

After six months of negotiations, HCA fails to make progress on staffing, patient and worker safety, while engaging in egregious union-busting campaign, union members say.

Registered Nurses at three Healthcare Corporation of America (HCA)-owned hospitals—Riverside Community Hospital, West Hills Hospital, and Los Robles Regional Medical Center—will begin a five day strike on Wednesday, November 22. Licensed Medical Professionals, including Therapists, Pharmacists, Laboratory Scientists and others, will also strike at Los Robles Regional Medical Center. The strike will begin at 7:00 am on November 22nd, and will conclude at 7:00 am on November 27th. Picketing will take place daily at hospitals from November 22-November 26 from 7am to 12pm; and 7am to 10am on Thanksgiving Day. Two-thousand four hundred nurses and licensed medical professionals at HCA's three Southern California facilities are represented by SEIU 121RN. 

Pasadena, CA—Nurses and Licensed Medical Professionals at three Southern California hospitals owned by Healthcare Corporation of America (HCA)—the largest for-profit healthcare chain in the US—will begin a five day strike on November 22, as their contract negotitations stretch into a sixth month. Throughout negotiations, the healthcare professionals have repeatedly raised concerns related to staffing, patient, and staff safety—but they say that HCA has failed to consider their proposals in a meaningful way. They say say cost-saving measures implemented by HCA lie at the root of their concerns.

At all three facilities, Nurses say they are routinely put out of ratio—staffed with fewer nurses than California’s minimum nurse-to-patient ratio law requires. The pattern reflects a system-wide crisis in care. A report released by SEIU earlier this year found that HCA—the largest for-profit healthcare chain in the U.S.—staffed hospitals at 30% below the national average. Investigations by the California Department of Public Health reveal that the three hospitals violated nurse staffing laws more than five-hundred times in the previous three years, based on reported incidents alone.

Nurses at the Southern California hospitals have flagged other ways in which their hospitals have not provided enough resources, putting patients and workers at serious risk. Emergency call-systems have been outsourced to off-site call centers, creating miscommunication and dangerous lags in response times to codes which require immediate attention. At times, nurses say, code teams are dispatched to the wrong unit, or the wrong hospital entirely.

On many hospital units, patient sitters—who carefully monitor patients and intervene to prevent falls and injuries—are replaced by off-site virtual sitters, who watch patients on a video monitor and can only give verbal instructions, often to patients who are confused or facing emotional crisis. Nurses say that this system is woefully inadequate to help patients who can inadvertently, or intentionally harm themselves.

Nurses at all three hospitals have also called attention to the chronic problem of workplace violence. They say that workplace violence training and hospital security do not meet the threat that they are exposed to on a daily basis, and management has resisted the call to make improvements. At the bargaining table, management has even refused a proposal to create a safety committee that can implement serious changes.

Instead of listening to frontline nurses and healthcare professionals on these critical issues and others, HCA has retaliated against union leaders and engaged in a campaign of disinformation about the strike. At all three facilities, management has removed literature from locked, union-designated bulletin boards. Union representatives—and even some bargaining team members who work at the hospitals—have been barred from the facility. At Riverside Community Hospital, management circulated a flyer stating that a legally protected ten-day strike in 2020 violated the law, mischaracterizing an arbitration HCA filed over messages on picket signs that called attention to a lack of PPE during the pandemic. Union members say that HCA’s heavy-handed response to the planned strike is intended to sow fear and spread doubt.

“It saddens me that HCA has chosen to go down this path,” said Corina Haney, a nurse who works on the Burn Unit at West Hills Hospital and a member of the union’s negotiations team. “HCA could focus its energy on working with us to fix the serious problems at our hospitals—many of them matters of life and death. Instead, they’ve chosen to retaliate against us for even raising these issues. Publicly sounding the alarm is an extension of our patient advocacy. I have been threatened that security would be called on me for discussing the strike in a break room. HCA is creating a rift between staff and management—one they can only heal by working with us at the bargaining table,” Haney said.

The strike follows a surge in labor activism this year, which has included strikes and other actions at healthcare facilities.

“The pandemic was a catalyst for union members to take collective action, and for non-union workers to organize,” said Rosanna Mendez, Executive Director of SEIU 121RN.

“Working people everywhere are demanding recognition for their sacrifice, and that sentiment is strongly felt by healthcare workers. By going on strike, nurses and professionals at HCA are standing up to corporate greed for the benefit of their patients, their families, and their communities,” Mendez said.

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SEIU Local 121RN represents registered nurses and other healthcare professionals in California.

This member-led organization is committed to supporting optimum working conditions that allow nurses to provide quality patient care and safety.