Sutter Calls for Service Cuts Despite it’s Nearly $900 Million in Profits

Registered nurses will hold a bake sale and rally Tuesday outside two large Sutter Health hospitals in the East Bay and Peninsula to call attention to cuts in services that have negative impacts to the communities served by its hospitals.  Of particular concern is that recent cuts have targeted services involving women.
 
Sutter is making these cuts despite sitting on over $2.4 billion in assets and having reported its profits last year, which leaped by 30 percent over the previous year, to $878 million.
 
At Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley and Oakland, Sutter has restricted access of high-quality breast pumps to low-income women in the East Bay, whose children, born with serious complications, are hospitalized in the intensive care nursery.  Alta Bates’ program for early breast cancer screening for women with disabilities has also just been discontinued.
 
What: Bake Sale and Rally
Date: Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
Time: 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Locations:      

Alta Bates Summit Hospital
2450 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley, CA   
RALLY AT 3:30 p.m.
 
Mills Peninsula Hospital
1501 Trousdale Avenue, Burlingame, CA
RALLY AT 4:00 p.m.
 
At Sutter Mills Peninsula in Burlingame, the hospital has now curtailed the use of conference rooms for breastfeeding support groups who, according to Sutter, bring in no money. Additionally, among the cuts in services to acute rehab, skilled nursing, and dialysis, Mill Peninsula has cut its Pediatrics services.

In the Sacramento Valley region, Sutter recently announced the closure of its birthing center at Auburn Faith Hospital.

Sutter has also chosen to propose massive employment cuts for over 2,600 nurses, including to professional standards, benefits, and safe staffing, at both Alta Bates Summit and Mills-Peninsula.  It is especially disgraceful, say the RNs, that its cuts overall are clearly aimed at services for women and a workforce that is more than 95 percent female.