All Roles

When flu season arrives, it’s important to stay well. As a matter of patient and workplace safety and professional pride, we can take steps to protect ourselves, our families, co-workers, and members and patients from flu and other infectious diseases. Here’s how. 

Vaccinate yourself and others

• If you don’t get the flu, you won’t pass it on. The vaccine reduces the chance you will get the flu. Encourage others to get vaccinated, too.

Keep flu out of the air

• Limit the time patients with suspected flu spend in open waiting rooms; separate them from others.
• Offer surgical masks to people who are coughing or sneezing and encourage them to cover their coughs. Supply tissues, trash cans and hand sanitizer in waiting areas.
• Place patients with flu in a private room.
• Avoid unnecessary transport of infectious patients — and have them wear surgical masks outside their rooms.

Keep flu off of yourself. Follow standard and droplet precautions

• Wear eye protection, gown and gloves.
• Wear respiratory protection when in the room with the patient and until the air has cleared after the patient has left the room (about one hour), or if you are doing procedures that may aerosolize infectious particles.
• Wash your hands often. Use hand sanitizer or wash with soap and water before and after all patient care.
• Avoid touching your face, clothing or mask with your hands.

Keep the environment clean

• Focus cleaning on high-contact surfaces: door knobs, elevator buttons, reception desks, exam tables, pharmacy furniture. 

Forty percent of U.S. marriages end in divorce after an average of eight years. Most business partnerships fail to meet expectations. And most campaigns end when they achieve their goals or the world moves on.

But the Labor Management Partnership between Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions has beaten the odds: October 2017 marks the 20th anniversary of the partnership’s founding, making it by far the largest, longest-running and most sweeping such partnership in the country.

We’ve accomplished a lot together. And in a world of change, sustaining a healthy long-term relationship is an achievement in itself. A key to our success has been the willingess to honestly reflect on our successes, failures, and opportunities to improve. 

By working in partnership, says Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO Bernard Tyson, “We have tapped into the potential of smart people all over the organization coming here every single day trying to figure out, ‘How do I improve quality, how do I improve service, how do I improve affordability?’ That’s an incredible competitive advantage for the organization.”

Marking a milestone

This fall Kaiser Permanente and the union coalition will be celebrating those achievements with special events and employee outreach. It won’t be all cake and balloons, however. LMP regional councils, unit-based team sponsors and co-leads, and others will host reflection sessions where workers, managers and physicians can share their experiences, pain points and suggestions for the future of partnership. Participants will consider three questions:

• What is different since we created partnership? (Or, what do you see as the top accomplishments of partnership?)
• What are the greatest challenges it faces today?
• How might we address those challenges, to strengthen partnership now and in the future?

Getting results

Partnership is not easy, and the parties don’t always agree on things. So what’s kept it going?

“It’s nice if we can all get along,” says Tyson. “But most important, we’re here to get results.” Here are some of the results achieved in partnership:

• Performance improvement: More than 50,000 team-led improvement projects since 2007, with measurable gains in quality, service, the work environment—and cost savings exceeding $48 million in 2016.
• Best place to work: Industry-leading wages and benefits, a voice in decision making, and an Employment and Income Security Agreement providing retraining and redeployment for displaced workers.
• Joint marketing: Strategic engagement brought strong gains in KP membership, union coalition membership, and more than $108 million in revenue for Kaiser Permanente in 2016.
• Job training and career advancement: More than 300,000 professional, academic and skill-enhancement courses taken by 104,000 coalition-represented employees since 2007.
• Systems collaboration: Joint implemention of multiple complex programs and systems, including KP HealthConnect, Claims Connect, ICD-10 and call center reorganization.

Lessons for success

All of the above have garnered attention from business, union and academic leaders over the years.

“The Labor Management Partnership is a shining example of how you bring labor and management together to produce results,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO. “What I love about this model is the notion that, no matter where you work in the system, you have a place at the table and your voice is heard.”

Working in partnership also holds lessons that apply outside of work—including lessons that might have saved some of those failed marriages.

“If you are going to be a good partner and have a successful relationship, with a partner, kids, friends,” says a facilitator from 2015 national bargaining, “you have to have your partner’s needs in mind as well as your own.”

To learn more about LMP anniversary activities, visit the 20th Anniversary How-to Guide.

When the leaders of Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions shook hands on their Labor Management Partnership 20 years ago, they weren’t sure where it would take them. Today, it is the largest, longest-running partnership of its kind. It is also the most studied by university researchers.

A new book published by the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA) and Cornell University Press shows that the partnership remains a model for workplace innovation. “The Evolving Healthcare Landscape: How Employees, Organizations, and Institutions are Adapting and Innovating” devotes three chapters to LMP’s history, accomplishments and challenges.

Lessons for others

Adrienne Eaton and Rebecca Givan, professors at Rutgers University, and Peter Lazes, a director and researcher at The City University of New York, studied six health care partnerships, including LMP. They were struck by:

“…the extent to which unions have been proactive in driving [all] these efforts....Another development in health care partnerships has been a significant deepening of the role of labor relations staff in operational matters.

“It is [also] important to note that the cases described here have influenced one another because the key stakeholders have directly learned from each other....[For example,] union and management stakeholders in Los Angeles [Department of Health Services and SEIU Local 721] as well as union leaders from the University of Vermont Medical Center have looked to Kaiser for answers.”

Another chapter, by Jody Gittell of Brandeis University and KP Northwest staff members Joan Resnick, Sarah Lax and Eliana Temkin, reports on regional efforts to promote collaboration across work teams. KP was selected for the study in part for what the authors call its “record of leadership and innovation [including] in patient care delivery, health information systems and labor-management relations.” Several strategies, including “living room huddles”—an informal, building-wide get-together—and job shadowing across departments led to higher employee engagement and patient satisfaction scores.

An inside look

The chapter “Leading Change Together” by Jim Pruitt, vice president of labor relations for the Permanente Federation, and Paul Cohen, LMP senior business consultant, explains the conditions that gave rise to the partnership, the need to implement it consistently across the organization and the way it achieves results:

“By bringing together diverse points of view and providing a framework for joint problem solving, the Labor Management Partnership has helped Kaiser Permanente tackle difficult issues....The partnership formed because conditions demanded change. It has endured because it has achieved measurable results. And it continues to flex and grow because we follow a few key principles and practices [including] self-directed work teams, interest-based problem solving and honest conversations.”

All of which explains why outside experts continue to take an interest in the joint efforts of KP and the union coalition. Pruitt and Cohen quote Thomas Kochan, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, who put it this way in a 2013 study:

“Kaiser Permanente is now one of the nation’s leaders in the use of frontline teams to improve health care delivery....The Labor Management Partnership continues to serve…as a model for health care delivery and improvement.”