The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting (below) on the impact of the crisis on Bay Area hospitals including Stanford Health (which operates as a stand-alone entity independent of Stanford University) and parts of UC-San Francisco. It notes that the UC continued employment guarantee to staff ends June 30.
Bay Area hospitals slash workers’ pay as losses from coronavirus pile up
Mallory Moench, April 28, 2020 Updated: April 29, 2020 6:18 a.m., San Francisco Chronicle
Stephanie Lum Ho lost half her work hours when the coronavirus pandemic forced UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Walnut Creek to halve the number of its physical therapy patients this month and send the rest to telemedicine. Lum Ho and hundreds of other workers at UCSF Children’s Hospitals, Stanford Health Care and Marin General Hospital have lost hours and pay as business has dried up during the shelter-in-place order, hospital executives and workers’ unions said. The University of California said it may begin laying off employees at the end of June.
“I’m living day to day wondering — am I going to be homeless, am I going to have groceries to feed my family?” said Lum Ho, who authorizes insurance payments for the physical therapy office. “The unknown is the most troublesome part of this.”
Since mid-March, Bay Area hospitals have delayed most surgeries and turned away many face-to-face visits with nonemergency patients. The mandatory safety measures cost the medical centers their primary source of revenue as they prepared for the COVID-19 surge that, for the most part, never came. Stanford Hospital postponed more than 3,000 surgeries and saw patient numbers drop in half. President and CEO David Entwistle said the hospital lost more than $135 million in March and April. He said he hopes the hospital will recoup its losses by the end of the fiscal year in September.
In San Francisco, UCSF Health is “incurring significant costs due to this crisis” and reduced patient numbers that which affected revenue, said spokeswoman Jennifer O’Brien. She said it is too early to project the financial impact. At UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, which employs its own staff, some surgical technicians haven’t worked a day in six weeks, said Vanessa Coe, a coordinator with the National Union of Healthcare Workers. At least 300 other workers, including hearing specialists and medical assistants who screen patients, are working as few as one or two days a week, the union said.
Dr. Michael Anderson, the hospital’s president, said in an April 16 letter to employees obtained by The Chronicle that the financial impact and consequences of reducing the number of patients “have been extreme.”
“During the next few months, we will need to make difficult choices to regain financial stability,” Anderson said in the letter. “This is the challenging reality that hospitals throughout the country must address.”
At Marin General Hospital, more than 50 medical technicians lost hours and pay for a day of work per week, said Matt Artz, spokesman for the National Union of Healthcare Workers. Cardiac sonographers and MRI techs lost more days, he said. The hospital was hit with a “significant decline” in revenue from delaying surgeries and has spent $4 million for coronavirus prep and patient care, spokeswoman Jamie Maites said last week.
Stanford Health Care has 14,000 employees, most of whom had to make an unwelcome choice on Monday: take a 20% pay cut for 10 weeks or use paid time off. Nearly everyone took the time off, said CEO Entwistle.
“The reason we’re doing this paid time off ... is to have no layoffs,” Entwistle said. The pay cut to nurses may be more or less than 20%, depending on the number of patients they care for, said Kathy Stormberg, a union vice president. The cut will be especially hard for nurses supporting family members who have lost their job during the pandemic, Stormberg said. “It was hard to support them on a full salary.”
Stanford Health Care is a separate corporate entity from Stanford University, which sits on a $27.7 billion endowment, Entwistle said. “We stand on our own financial feet,” he said. “The endowment of the university does not come into play.”
At Sutter Health, hundreds of employees donated paid-time-off hours into a leave-sharing program to help impacted co-workers, a spokeswoman said. Partly because of that program and another disaster relief fund, the hospital system is still paying employees, even when hours are cut, she said.
UCSF halved Lum Ho’s hours in early April. She hoped UCSF’s policy of paid leave for employees impacted by COVID-19 would cover her, but because her hours were cut due to lower patient numbers, rather than a direct COVID-19 impact — such as a colleague testing positive for the coronavirus — she said her request was denied.
Lum Ho and hundreds of co-workers wrote a letter to management on April 8, asking that leave be made available to those who lost hours because of the outbreak. A week later, Anderson, the hospital president, sent the letter explaining “difficult” choices. He declined the workers’ request.
Coe, with the National Union of Healthcare Workers, said UCSF created a labor pool so that workers could sign up for five shifts at a time, but there weren’t enough for everyone. When Lum Ho logged into the online portal two hours after it opened on Friday, only a couple of spots were left on days she was already scheduled to work. Like many of her colleagues, Lum Ho has used 40 hours of continuing education provided by UCSF and most of her paid time off in this crisis: sick days, holidays, vacation. Just 50 hours remain, she said. It means she won’t visit her family in Hawaii this year. She and her husband will miss his sister’s wedding. Plans to attend a baptism are out. Last week, she applied for unemployment for when her paid time off runs out, but hasn’t heard back yet.
Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/
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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2020/04/listen-to-regents-health-services.html
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