By all accounts, a nurse’s union is likely to improve the performance of Huntington Memorial Hospital

The management of Huntington Memorial Hospital (HMH) would have the Pasadena community believe that it is a great hospital and that current efforts by its registered nurses to form a labor union in affiliation with the California Nurses Association (CNA) will lead to ruin. It may be hard for management to admit, but neither claim could be further from the truth.

Perhaps HMH once was great, but the most recent evidence indicates quite the opposite. The September 2013 issue of Consumer Reports (the gold standard when it comes to providing trustworthy evaluations of consumer products and services) contained a detailed article entitled, “Your safer-surgery survival guide.”  

Included in this article are surgery ratings (i.e., how hospitals compare in avoiding adverse events in Medicare patients during their hospital stay for surgery) for nearly 200 California hospitals. The hospitals were ranked on a sliding scale of “best” to “average” to “worse.” Only eight hospitals at the very bottom of the heap were given a “worse” score. HMH was one of them.    

More recently, on Jan. 18 the Los Angeles Times published an extensive report, “Hospital check-up,” that provided grades for major LA and Orange County hospitals as determined by the respected Leapfrog Group, an employer-backed nonprofit that tracks health care quality. According to the Times, since 2012 Leapfrog has been analyzing information it collects as well as data reported to Medicare to assign performance scores to California hospitals.

For three years in a row, from fall 2012 to fall 2014, Leapfrog gave HMH a fairly miserable “C” letter grade. Even worse, the fall 2014 numerical score Leapfrog gave to HMH was below the state average of 3.0 (on a scale of 0 to 4.0, with 4.0 being the best). Furthermore, according to the online version of the article posted Jan. 17 by the Times with a different title, “How safe is your hospital? A look at California ratings,” HMH’s numerical score is also worse than the LA County average of 2.7.

According to Maribeth Shannon, who monitors hospital quality for the California HealthCare Foundation, the Leapfrog grades “are in line with what other publicly reported data show,” the Times reported.

HMH management would no doubt counter that the hospital’s Magnet designation indicates it is an excellent hospital. But even ardent champion of HMH management, Geneviève Clauvreul, wrote in an April 9, 2008 blog post, “The Myth of the Magnet Hospital,” that Magnet designation is a dubious distinction, at best.

What wasn’t a dubious distinction was when a handful of California hospitals were recently chosen as Ebola treatment centers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (commonly referred to as the CDC). A hospital really has to have its act together to be designated an Ebola treatment center by the CDC, and in the case of California, the four hospitals that achieved this mark of excellence are all in the northern part of the state.   

Those four hospitals are:  Kaiser Oakland Medical Center, Kaiser South Sacramento Medical Center, the UC Davis Medical Center and the UC San Francisco Medical Center. No hospital in Southern California, including HMH, made the grade with the CDC.

Which brings us back to Leapfrog scores. The highest-scoring hospital chain in California is Kaiser Permanente, which runs 35 hospitals in our state. Kaiser’s latest aggregate Leapfrog score is 3.9, which is nearly perfect. Right behind Kaiser is the University of California (UC) hospital system, which runs five medical centers. The UC system’s latest aggregate Leapfrog score is 3.8; again, close to perfection, the Times reported.

And here’s the kicker: Essentially 100 percent of the bedside RNs in both the Kaiser and UC systems are represented by a union. Furthermore, the RNs at the two Kaiser hospitals and the two UC hospitals that have been designated Ebola treatment centers not only have 100 percent union representation, but the unions are affiliated with the CNA, the same organization HMH RNs are working with to form a union. For HMH management to claim that if their RNs form a union with the CNA it will lead to disaster is just utter nonsense.

What is HMH management afraid of? Clearly, there is a strong correlation between unionized RNs and excellent hospitals. Rather than opposing the efforts by their RNs to form a union with the CNA, HMH management should be supporting them. The pro-union RNs at HMH want nothing more than to restore the hospital to its former greatness and that’s the main reason they want to form a union.  

Therefore, HMH management should allow a fair and free election, now set for April 15 and 16, on whether or not to form a union and stop its harassment and intimidation of pro-union RNs, as recently reported by the Pasadena Star-News. HMH management has already been charged by the National Labor Relations Board with four allegations of illegal union-busting activities, and it may soon be socked with more.

John Grula, PhD, is affiliated with the Southern California Federation of Scientists.
Originally posted: http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/hard_facts/14291/