Therapists, social workers and psychologists who provide mental health care for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California staged a one-day strike on Wednesday in opposition to new technology that they say could replace their work and diminish patient care standards. More than 23,000 Kaiser nurses joined the work stoppage to show support for approximately 2,400 therapists.
"We want mental health care that works for patients, not just Kaiser's bottom line," said Raul Figueroa, a therapist in Sacramento. "Therapy is about human connection, but Kaiser increasingly wants its patients to rely on chatbots. Its therapists go from patient-to-patient like they're working on an assembly line instead of helping people overcome depression and trauma."
The National Union of Healthcare Workers authorized the strike last month, alleging that Kaiser unilaterally revamped its mental health triage system and proposed contract changes the union says would weaken patient care safeguards and allow greater use of artificial intelligence and outsourcing in care delivery.
"Patients entering Kaiser's mental health care system are no longer guaranteed to talk to a human therapist trained to ask the right questions to determine what kind of treatment they need and how urgently they need it," the union said in a news release. "Now, most patients must answer yes-or-no prompts, while Kaiser telephone operators and artificial intelligence decide the next step. As a result, therapists report seeing more patients who should have been seen immediately or assigned to a different treatment program. When it comes to AI, Kaiser is setting the stage to not just replace work done by therapists but to replace therapists themselves."
Members of the California Nurses Association joined picket lines in several locations.
"An injury to one of us is an injury to all of us, so nurses will be standing in solidarity with our mental health therapy colleagues as they go on strike," CNA President Michelle Gutierrez Vo said. "We know working people have to stand together, and we're proud to stand alongside Kaiser therapists as they fight for meaningful, commonsense protections for our patients and for working people."
Kaiser is "disappointed that NUHW leadership has chosen to call on their members and the California Nurses Association to walk away from patients for a day" while it is still at the bargaining table with NUHW, Lionel Sims, senior vice president of human resources for Kaiser Permanente Northern California, said in a statement to Becker's Hospital Review.
Kaiser said it is not going to replace mental health care workers with AI, pointing to the fact that it has significantly increased the number of mental health clinicians over the past five years. "At Kaiser Permanente, AI does not replace human assessment, and it does not make care decisions," he said. "Our care teams are always at the center of decision making with our patients."
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