Kaiser Health Care Strike: Patient Care Concerns Relating to Staffing Levels
- Richard Sykes
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
LANCASTER, CA — Nurses at Kaiser Health facilities report that low staffing levels, especially in chemotherapy clinics, are causing safety concerns as patient numbers increase. This is one of the arguments they are making during the current worker strike, stressing that it is really about patient safety.
Staff members who spoke about conditions inside the chemo clinic described a steady erosion of safe staffing levels that accelerated in the weeks before the walkout. “We’re in the chemotherapy clinic, we’re supposed to max out at 60 patients a day. In the last week or two before the strike, they had us taking on 70 to 80 patients daily with the same amount of staff,” one nurse said, describing how the clinic’s schedule was expanded without replacing nurses.
Nurses Describe Unsafe Caseloads and Rushed Care
According to staff accounts, the clinic’s patient capacity was increased after an additional wing was built and designated as “overflow.” Rather than hiring more registered nurses to cover the added appointments, workers say management opened the schedule to more patients while keeping staffing levels unchanged.
Nurses described a cycle in which short staffing forces hurried assessments and fragmented care.
“So instead of taking six, seven patients safely a day, we’ll be taking up to 10 or 11 chemo patients every day, which is very unsafe,” a nurse said. The staff emphasized that chemotherapy visits vary widely in length — “Chemotherapy can range anywhere from one hour that they're there, or they could be there for eight hours” — and that the unpredictable duration compounds the risk when assignments are overloaded.
Nurses described a cycle in which short staffing forces hurried assessments and fragmented care. “You’re supposed to do a full assessment of a patient before you start, and you’re getting 5 seconds to do it. It’s not safe for them, it’s not fair to them. This is their lives,” one staff member said.
They also reported that when additional nurses are provided, those nurses often lack chemotherapy training and are limited to basic infusions. “When they do give us extra nurses they give us nurses that cannot do chemotherapy. They tell us that’s good enough to make it,” a nurse said.
Staffing Model and Employment Practices Under Scrutiny
Staffers described a workforce increasingly composed of part-time and per-diem nurses, with only a handful of full-time positions in some clinics. “There’s only two full-time nurses in the Chemo Clinic as of now. In our clinic in Lancaster, they’re mostly either per diem or part-time,” one nurse explained, adding that management appears to limit full-time hiring in part to reduce benefit costs while still expecting part-time staff to pick up full-time hours.
Nurses expressed frustration with replacements who, in their view, do not meet expected standards of care.
That arrangement, nurses say, leaves gaps when part-timers cannot or will not take on extra shifts. “Now they’re holding them all at part-time apparently because that’s less on their benefits than they have to pay. But they’re expecting them to pick up full-time hours,” a staff member claimed. The result, they say, is a persistent shortfall of trained nurses to meet patient demand.
Patients Feel the Effects, Staff Say
Workers described patients noticing the difference. “Our patients tell us, you guys seem to be rushing all the time. I don’t feel like I can tell you what’s going on with me,” a nurse recounted. Staff also said some patients have been redirected to other facilities that are themselves at capacity, leaving some chemotherapy appointments delayed or unfilled.
Nurses expressed frustration with replacements who, in their view, do not meet expected standards of care. “We’ve had patients tell us afterwards, they went in to get their infusions, and the nurses that are working there aren’t even telling them their names… So the people that they have replacing us clearly are no good at what they’re doing,” one staff member said.
Staff Say Safety Concerns Have Led To Formal Objections
When nurses raise objections to unsafe assignments, they say those concerns are dismissed. “We tell them that we’re going to do an objection to assignment, they tell us, well, there’s no reason. There is an absolute reason for it. Our patients are not being taken care of safely,” a nurse explained, describing a sense that management prioritizes other areas of the hospital over bedside nursing support. “They’re taking the support staff and pulling into the back office area where the doctors work because the doctors are more important than the nurses,” the staff member added.
Nurses also pointed to staff attrition as a driver of the crisis: “We’ve had several nurses leave the field over the last couple of years, and none of them have been replaced,” one worker said.
What Staff Want and What’s Next
Nurses who spoke for this article said they want to return to patients but only under staffing conditions that allow safe, thorough care. “We would like to be back with our patients. We would like to give them the care that they deserve and that they’re paying for,” a nurse explained.
The accounts from chemo clinic staff paint a picture of a system stretched thin: expanded schedules, fewer full-time nurses, reliance on undertrained replacements and patients who feel rushed. Those conditions, nurses say, have led to errors and to a level of risk they can no longer accept.
Further reporting is needed to document management’s response and any negotiations underway. For now, clinic staff say the strike was a last resort to force changes they believe are essential to patient safety and to the sustainability of oncology care at their facilities.
Comments