Kaiser San Rafael Nurses Rally Against Layoffs & AI Destroying Jobs & Healthcare

Kaiser San Rafael nurses to protest clinic layoffs that will delay and deprive patients of care
California Nurses Association/National Nurses United

Despite making nearly $13 billion in profit last year, Kaiser plans to lay off 42 RNs and NPs

Registered nurses who work at Kaiser Permanente San Rafael facilities will hold a rally on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025 to protest Kaiser’s plans to lay off 42 RNs and NPs from their outpatient clinics despite the health care giant posting nearly $13 billion in profits last year, announced California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU) today. RNs point out that patients already suffer unacceptably long wait times — weeks and even months — to get an appointment or to be seen, and that further cuts to staff will delay and deprive Kaiser members of needed care, leading to potentially deadly consequences. The proposed cuts represent about one-fourth of nurses working in Kaiser San Rafael clinics.

“It’s absolutely unacceptable that Kaiser made $13 billion last year, yet is cutting staff,” said Colleen Gibbons, an RN in medical-surgical at Kaiser San Rafael and the chief nurse representative. “We already have patients in all kinds of clinics that wait weeks and weeks, even months, to get seen or scheduled for really important tests and procedures that save lives, like colonoscopies and getting checked out for skin cancers.

Who: RNs and NPs from Kaiser San Rafael facilities
What: Rally to stop unnecessary layoffs
When: Thursday, Aug. 21, Noon 12 p.m.
Where: Kaiser San Rafael downtown clinic, 1033 3rd St., San Rafael, CA, sidewalk outside clinic

“These layoffs are not because there is no need for our care,” said Hunter Mills, RN in the Special Needs Department. “The demand is greater than ever. The layoffs are actually all part of Kaiser’s grand master plan to keep pushing more and more patients to make do with telehealth, because it’s way cheaper for Kaiser to provide. But we nurses know that telephone calls and video visits are poor substitutes for a provider examining you in person, up close, in the flesh. Kaiser needs to reverse these layoffs, now!”

Nurses have been alerting and organizing their community to stop the layoffs through flyering and media ads, asking concerned Kaiser members and all patients to email The Permanente Medical Group CEO and Executive Director Maria Ansari to demand that she rescind the layoffs.

CNA represents about 500 registered nurses working in Kaiser San Rafael facilities, both hospital and outpatient clinics.

AI Technology Raises Concerns Among Nurses at Kaiser Permanente

https://cryptorank.io/news/feed/2ae6e-ai-technology-raises-concerns-among-nurses

AIExplainedNurses

May, 11, 2024
by CryptoPolitan

Kaiser Permanente nurses demonstrate on the streets to tell the world about their worries that some healthcare facilities are putting huge emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) to replace human nurses. This protest follows the recent survey by National Nurses United, which highlighted the underlying fears among nurses as they think of ways its implementation may affect their patients.

Nurses Give doubts concerning Patient Security

Study results from study is that 60 % of the surveyed members of the National Nurses United do not trust either their employers or the AI technology to prioritize patient safety. It is the lack of trust that arose as a result of the perception of the staffing shortage and neglect on the part of the authorities, who became prominent during the events of COVID-19.

Nurses felt and expressed that hospital administrations are at fault to a great extent for the neglect of staffing shortages and inadequate supply management initiatives, which erode their trust in hospitals’ administration structures.

In addition, nurses at Kaiser Permanente are scared of losing their jobs due to AI mergers because these technologies are capable of replacing the nurse’s job. Between the current 40% of respondents indicating that they were researching how to adapt their employees to changes in electronic health records, technological replacement anxiety emerges. Nurses fear AI increases the chance of medication errors to a more serious level, including a patient being attended to the wrong surgery room or lacking medication just at the time when it is urgently needed.

Conflicts of AI-enabled patient evaluation

AI algorithms have been a subject of discussion, approximately 50% of results show the hospitals that are into AI deployment for recognizing patient priority levels are outsourced by their nursing staff.

Two-thirds of that sampling were not so happy with the accuracy of machine-made measurements, putting apart AI assessments and extending the gap of disagreement to their clinical evaluations. Nurses state that artificial intelligence often cannot take into account all of those minute observations and critical thinking that nurses use to make decisions and, therefore, might compromise patient safety.

AI projects have been significantly criticized, more specifically towards AI initiatives introduced by Kaiser Permanente. One such project involves the application of an AI algorithm to read text messages from patients and to grade the importance of the responses from medical data.

In certain cases, nurses, including Cathy Kennedy, president of the California Nurses Association, have even claimed that the dependence on AI algorithms to replace human triage nurses is simply inappropriate and can result in putting patients’ lives at risk. Besides, it has been questioned whether the in-time data transfer for AI’s generated reports from the nurses is a reliable option when hospital nurse staff turn out to be underemployed.