Clinicians say patients routinely wait months between appointments, and therapists are given unmanageable workloads.
When most of us think of mental health care, we think of seeing a therapist once per week. But at Kaiser Permanente facilities in California and Hawaii, clinicians — including psychologists, clinical social workers, marriage and family therapists, and addiction medicine counselors — say their patients routinely wait months between appointments. Not only that: There’s no limit to the number of patients that can be a-signed to one therapist.
“You’re expected to follow anybody you have seen in the last two years. At times, the number of people I have seen in the last two years has been up to 600,” Sabrina Chaumette, a Kaiser therapist in Oakland, told Truthout.
Since July 2021, Kaiser mental health clinicians in California, who are members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), have attempted to use contract negotiations to demand the resources they need to provide better care for their patients. But workers say management has been unwilling to budge on changes necessary to reduce their unmanageable workloads and reverse understaffing, so on August 15 — nearly 14 months after their first bargaining session — over 2,000 Kaiser therapists in California went on strike. Nearing two months, it is the longest mental health strike in history. And on August 29, 57 of their colleagues in Hawaii, also NUHW members, joined them.
Kaiser is the largest nonprofit HMO in the United States, operating in eight states and the District of Columbia. It’s the largest health insurance plan in California, with more than half the market share, and the second-largest in Hawaii. However, despite reporting an $8.1 billion profit in 2021, Kaiser staffs only one full-time-equivalent mental health clinician for every 2,600 members in Northern California and just one therapist for every 5,500 patients in Hawaii, according to NUHW. Union members say this flies in the face of Kaiser’s key marketing promise: That by offering health insurance plans and operating hospitals and other facilities under one umbrella, patients receive better and more integrated care.
“I call it the glitter cloud,” Rachel Kaya, a Kaiser therapist in Hawaii, told Truthout. “They put out into the world how they promote mental health care, how they help people thrive, and how they do fair labor bargaining. But in my field, we talk a lot about the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk.” Unlike their colleagues in California, whose contract expired, Kaiser therapists in Hawaii are still without a first contract four years after joining NUHW.
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