Healthcare hospital workers seek accountability and transparency on behalf of the public interest and underinsured and uninsured Kern County residents.
BAKERSFIELD, CA – Healthcare workers at Kern Medical Center (KMC), represented by Service Employees International Union, Local 521, filed a lawsuit on Monday, July 18, 2022, against the Kern County Hospital Authoriity (KCHA) for numerous violations of California open meeting and public disclosure laws of abandoning its core mission of providing health services to the medically under-served of Kern County
The lawsuit filed Monday in California Superior Court accuses Kern Medical management of multiple violations of the Brown Act and the California Public Records Act — laws that require public agencies, including hospital districts like KCHA, to disclose how they spend tax money and deliberate in public. It also accuses KCHA management of violating its enabling statute, which requires the Hospital Authority to “integrate its county hospital services… with the objective of eliminating discrimination or segregation based on economic disability.”
The lawsuit alleges that the Hospital Authority created a stand-alone corporation, Kern Medical Surgery Center LLC, under the guise of providing ambulatory surgeries, but instead is also providing boutique spa services and cosmetic surgeries to the residents of West Bakersfield at the expense of investments that could improve the quality of care provided to indigent residents.
The following remarks can be attributed to Kern Medical healthcare workers and SEIU 521 members:
“Healthcare workers like myself know very well that the Hospital Authority must do more to comply with the law and provide quality care to our patients, ” said Eva Dominguez, MRI Technologist and SEIU Local 521 Member. “We’ve provided our union with the facts that we believe point to Kern Medical’s efforts to operate above public oversight.”
“In Kern Medical’s Surgical Department, we don’t always have the equipment we rely on to do our jobs,” said Robin Heber, Operating Room Surgical Technologist at Kern Medical and SEIU 521 Member. “There have been multiple instances when our equipment isn’t available because it was sent to the Kern Medical Surgery, LLC facilities. Sometimes we find this out at the worst possible time while our patients are in the operating room with our staff and we either don’t have the equipment in inventory or we got it back from the surgery center without it being reconfigured to the needs of our patients.”
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