Posted on 04/30/2017 9:01:26 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
A bill aimed at improving patient care and staffing at 560 California dialysis clinics that serve more than 63,000 patients is threading its way through the state Legislature despite sharp opposition from some in the industry.
Authored by state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, the measure has been fueled by dialysis workers in California who have been attempting to unionize through SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West.
SB 349 calls for a staffing ratio of one registered nurse for every eight dialysis patients, one technician for every three patients and one social worker for every 75 patients. It also mandates a 45-minute gap between the time one patient finishes treatment and the next one begins. That’s so staff would have time to properly clean the equipment, thereby reducing potential infections.
SB 349 may be well intended, but a coalition of patient advocates, nurses, physicians and clinics specializing in dialysis care are firmly against it.
Data collected by the California Dialysis Council (CDC) show that increased costs associated with the measure — including longer transition times and mandated patient/staffing ratios — could force clinic closures throughout the state and reductions in appointment slots, particularly for dialysis patients who are treated in the evening.
The coalition calls SB 349 “a thinly veiled attempt by the bill’s sponsors to push for unionization of workers.”
(Excerpt) Read more at pasadenastarnews.com ...
Heaven help us.
"The scariest sentence in the English language is, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'".
-- Ronald Reagan
Of course. Legislation improves everything.
So glad I don’t live in that god-forsaken hellhole.
Wow, speaking of reality denial. Legislation creates camels when the objective is to improve horses.
Mandating a 45 minute gap between patients without regard to how long the actual dialysis clinic thinks it should take?
Sounds like a smoke break.
And plenty of prayer time for Muslims.
California is about to pass a bill for single payer insurance, that will give all illegals taxpayer funded medical care..
If you are not illegal you can forget getting dialysis. You can forget about getting anything medical...it will go to the invaders and new permanent dem voter base.
Also Brown just signed a bill for massive tax hikes on car registrations, fuel and other things all in the name of fixing the roads in cali. Of course billions of that money is not going for the roads.
Idiot legislatures thimk if you have it on paper staff will magically appear and be fully trained
This has nothing to do with governmental legislation. This has to do with a feel good program to make the voters swoon while assisting United Healthcare West and their product, the SEIU-UHW, to gain more control of the medical base of insurance in California. For government and the UHW company, it is win/win.
And the taxpayers will end up paying the bill when the businesses bail out of California just like they did with the auto insurance proposition 103 they created in 1988 that chased many of the insurance coverage people out of California.
Those liberal idiots just do not learn.
rwood
I took my Elderly Aunt to Dialysis three times a week for a Year. She was Blind, so I stayed with her while she was getting Treatment which lasted three to four Hours.
The Staffing Numbers they are coming up for what they consider proper Care are ridiculous.
Appointments are setup to maximize use of the very expensive Equipment and most of the time the schedule was met without delay.
The Machines Recycle after each Patient. The “Filters”, are not shared and the Tubes used to hook up the Patient to the Machine are new and thrown out after the Treatment ends.
There is always room for improvement, but the Dialysis Centers already have to meet certain Patient Health levels or risk not being paid for their services, even for those Patients that do not follow Diet and Lifestyle Protocol for their own care.
My hatred of Government grows every day.
SEIU is behind it, and I can assure you from having seen them operate in the healthcare arena, they are pure and unmitigated evil.
The article called the orgaization SEIU/UHW, meaning United Health West. I have dealt with UH through the military healthcare system, i.e., Tricare when they took the bid from Health Net a few years ago during the Obama administration with a $200 million bid more than Health Net gave the government. Problem was that Obama was the mouthpiece for UHC back in Chicago prior to his political aspirations and I can promise you he pulled some strings for them to get the western region for the military health care system.
UHC immediately hired Health Net to run their computer systems for them because they had never done military healthcare before and didn’t have the computer capacity or the programs to do it. They also got cheap and talked the military into allowing them to pull the service centers out of the medical facilities and did everything by fax or phone. So when you had a problem, you had another problem trying to get help as you had no one directly to talk to and the military was handcuffed.
Health Net has rebid and won the contract back along with additional work as the Tricare system conus has gone from four regions to three. And their systems wee already in place. But the service centers that were in the facilities before the bid are still not required. Just as expensive, and no direct service. Thanks United.
rwood
Two problems, though. First, the osmosis worked both ways. She absorbed a lot of sugar out of the solution, and gained weight without having enjoyed eating the sugar. Second, she had to be very careful about infections, since there was a direct connection to her abdominal cavity. Despite considerable care in keeping things sterile, she'd occasionally get an infection. That meant putting an antibiotic into the dialysis fluid before filling her abdomen with it. That always cleared up the infection, but the infection was an indication that somewhere she'd slipped up on keeping things sterile.
She eventually died of complications from the tuberculosis she'd had as a child. However, I'm grateful for the additional five years I had with her, made possible by CAPD.
If you or a loved one needs dialysis, at least ask if CAPD will work for you or them. It's not for everyone, but if it will work for you, it's a lot better than a dialysis machine.
“She eventually died of complications from the tuberculosis she’d had as a child. “
—
That sentence jumped out at me.
I was exposed to TB as a child,in the 30s,and still test positive on the tine test,although I never contracted the disease.
How many years had lapsed when the TB recurred?
I saw SEIU in action up here when they were trying to unionize a Boston hospital system...they hired a billboard truck accusing the hospital of Medicare fraud and parked it across the street from the main entrance. Andy Stern said if the hospital didn't unionize, he was going to drive a wedge between patients and their physicians.
I despise these people more than I have words for. They are total scum, all of them.
Thanks,that must have been very rough.
My father died of TB in 1938-——my brother and I were 5 and 2,but neither of us, nor my mother, got it.
.
But improving safety at abortion clinics is draconian.
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