Kaiser made very little movement when they came to the table yesterday, rejecting the four proposals we had given them in the previous two sessions. They did modify one proposal, to reference in the contract the vision plan coverage that is already part of our Health Plan. On our part, we made movement in order to reach a Tentative Agreement on the Safety article in the contract.
We spent some time in the afternoon trying to elicit from management the reasons for their objection to eliminating involuntary call as an option for staffing the Emergency Department. This will help us draft a counterproposal that hopefully addresses management’s concern while still meeting our goal to have all EDs staffed with dedicated teams sufficient to eliminate the need to force clinical staff to cover after-hours shifts.
