KP-NUHW Bargaining, Sept. 21, 2022 – A message from the KP bargaining team

To our therapists,

We appreciated hearing from those of you who found our previous message helpful to understand KP’s proposals and our rationale – all of which continues to be driven by what our patients need, while finding ways to also provide more of what you need.

We are all aware that there has been outreach to other stakeholders this week, with the goal of influencing the outcome of our negotiations with NUHW. While we appreciate and listen to others’ views, we want you to know that our commitment to you is steadfast, and where we are in the process is steadfast, as well.

We’ve demonstrated that we’ve listened to you and recognized your need for more indirect patient care (IPC) time and more support. Our proposal for 18% IPC is fair and is as far as we can go without endangering access for our members seeking mental health care. We have a framework in place to ensure you will receive practice support that will free more time for you to practice at your highest level. We are in the process of developing job descriptions for practice support roles and will be posting these soon.

In bargaining last week, we agreed to define patients who return after a year as a new patient, another demand that if not carefully managed will reduce access to care for these patients, should they need care a year later. We believe we can manage this so that doesn’t happen, but to be clear this takes us in the opposite direction from increasing access to care.

Throughout bargaining, we’ve reached numerous tentative agreements on various aspects of your work. We’ve responded to what your representatives tell us is most important to you. We have made numerous compromises in an attempt to prevent the strike, and we have continued to make additional compromises over the past two weeks of bargaining.

As we did in our message last week, we encourage you to ask NUHW leadership to share our proposal with you and let you have a say in the matter. We hope you will consider the situation carefully – not as a conflict to win or lose, but as a chance to reasonably conclude negotiations, end the disruption that has occurred, and start to move towards finding solutions and working collaboratively.

Sincerely,

Members of the Kaiser Permanente bargaining team:

Maria Koshy, MD
Inderpreet Dhillon, MD, MBA
Agnes Amistoso, MS, MA
Carrie Clark, LCSW
James Kempf, Ed.D.
Susan Seruby, LCSW
David Frizzell
Rudy Collins, MBA
Catherine Porter
Norah Eller