“Prime is keeping caregiver pay below market on pay and not investing in education, staffing or patient care at our hospitals. Executives are pocketing big profits instead of putting money back into our patients and communities. It’s time we all come together, stay united and continue the fight to raise caregiver wages, improve patient care, ensure education so we can take better care of our patients, and raise standards for ourselves, our patients, and our communities.”

Ron Alderette, EVS, Prime’s Garden Grove Medical Center

We, the caregivers at Prime Healthcare’s Centinela, Encino, and Garden Grove Hospitals, are united with one voice. We are guided by our strongest value: quality care for our patients. But Prime’s corporate model of healthcare, taking over struggling hospitals and then cutting staff, cutting services, and cutting care, is failing us and our patients.

Unfortunately, Prime Healthcare’s lack of investment is hurting workers, patients and our communities

Prime Healthcare’s stated mission is to deliver compassionate, quality care to patients and better healthcare to communities. But the quality of care at Prime’s hospitals just doesn’t measure up.

Here are just a few examples of the problems at Prime facilities documented by the California Dept of Public Health and the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:

At Prime’s Centinela facility:

• In 2018, Centinela was cited by CDPH for 44 complaints were made to the CA Dept of Public Health in 2018 – 33% above the CA average.
• The state cited 32 deficiencies, 220% above the statewide average.
• 10% of patients left the Emergency Dept without being seen – five times the state and national averages.
• Centinela patients spend close to twice the national average waiting in the ED waiting for a room after the doctor decided to admit them as an inpatient. A four hour and 30 minute wait!
• MRSA blood infections at Centinela are worse than the national benchmark and the hospital is not on track to meet 2020 MRSA prevention goals.

Prime’s Garden Grove facility:

• In the past 4 years, Garden Grove has paid out $150,000 in state penalties due to patient deaths following their C-sections.
• At Garden Grove the percentage of mothers whose deliveries were scheduled too early (1-2 weeks early), when a scheduled delivery wasn’t medically necessary was double the National and California Average (4% vs. state and national average of 2%)
• Is not on track to meet their MRSA and Central Line Associated Bloodstream Infections prevention goals for the year.

At Prime’s Encino facility:

• Patients spend almost twice the national average waiting for a room after being admitted in the ER.
• Only 27% of patients who were hospitalized for mental illness at Encino got follow up care within 30 days of discharge – lower than the state and national average.
• Is not on track to meet their MRSA prevention goal for the year.

For a company that prides itself on buying up struggling hospitals and turning them around, these are concerning results. They point to a lack of investment in the hospital and in the frontline workers who deliver care to the patients in our community. Prime caregivers earn significantly less than those who do similar work at nearby hospitals. The result is that Garden Grove Hospital suffers from high turnover rates and an inability to attract and retain the best quality caregivers in our communities.

Unfortunately, Prime’s recent proposals to its workforce show they have little interest in correcting these serious issues. Prime has proposed eliminating funding for caregiver training, cutting healthcare, and refusing to address wage disparity, making Encino even less competitive with other area hospitals.

To return to the values expressed in its mission statement, Prime needs to significantly increase its investment in its hospitals and the caregivers who work there.

Are you a Prime Healthcare worker? Join our SEIU-UHW members-only FB Group to talk to your coworkers about what we are doing to take action.

Do you get your healthcare at a Prime hospital? Contact us today.

Not an SEIU-UHW member yet? We want to hear from you!