Total Health and Workplace Safety

Bryant Terry is a vegan chef, author and advocate for food justice. His new cookbook, Afro-Vegan, will be published next year. Terry will whip up a batch of citrus collards with raisins for the Union Delegates Conference and share how to use cooking and urban gardening as a tool for social change. He recently spoke with Laureen Lazarovici of LMP Communications.

What was your journey?

My entree into this work was as a grassroots activist in low-income communities of color. I was living in New York City, going to cooking school, and seeing the disparity in the types of food available and the impact that had on the health of communities. When I learned about the risk of a shorter lifespan for our youth, that made me want to help young people be leaders to solve this problem. So I founded b-healthy!, which stands for Build Healthy Eating and Lifestyles to Help Youth.

I realized it was their parents making the purchases, so we had to figure out how to bring parents in, how to raise their food IQ. I saw how little time people have to cook. Cooking is this lost art. People don’t even know how to make a stir fry with vegetables. It is easy to cook meat. It is a lot harder to tease out the flavors and textures just using fruits, vegetables and grains. You’ll have negative connotations of vegetables if you’ve grown up eating vegetables from a can. Those don’t taste that good.

I’ve gone from omnivore to vegetarian to vegan. But it was not a linear path for me. We are all on a journey. There is no room for judgment. My mission is not to convert people into vegans or vegetarians. I am looking to improve public health through cookbooks.

What obstacles have you encountered and how did you overcome them?

When we start talking about what people eat, folks might say, ‘It’s my decision.’ But it is important to realize we are influenced to eat things that are unhealthy by marketing. Yes, we have some autonomy. But there are forces influencing us. I want to provide a counter-narrative. We are in a beautiful moment when people are more open to things like meatless Mondays. These diets are a tool; they are not the tool, to address the crisis.

What role can Kaiser Permanente and its workforce play?

I come from a family of health care providers. They tell me all the ways the current health care system does not provide tools to them to help their clients. They are taught to respond to crises and to give pharmaceuticals. So, the first thing I would say to health care workers is: it is important to take care of yourselves. I’m referring to diet, exercise, and stress reduction, especially since you all work such long hours. The people who are working to heal people can heal themselves.

I am impressed by how Kaiser Permanente is taking the lead in prevention. Kaiser Permanente is part of that counter-narrative. And I love the farmers’ markets at hospitals. That is brilliant.

What is your favorite recipe?

I do like the citrus collards with raisins. It is symbol of my embracing the African-American community. That community is so heavily impacted. If we can make a change there, we can change the whole system.

Cutting waste and saving money for Kaiser Permanente members and patients is good. But 350 Environmental Service workers in Southern California are taking that mission a step further by tending to Mother Earth as well.

Kaiser Permanente and two Labor Management Partnership-funded workforce development trusts are among the health care partners nationwide that are training frontline workers and managers in improved recycling, waste disposal, energy conservation and other green practices. The U.S. Department of Labor and the Healthcare Career Advancement Program, a national partnership of unions and hospitals, are leading the effort.

“‘Carbon footprint’ is a phrase that’s thrown around a lot,” says Milford “Leroy” Alaman, EVS operations manager at the Los Angeles Medical Center. “Now our staff is able to understand that when you are talking about conserving energy, water and electricity, you are talking about looking at the resources we have in our facility and holding on to just what we need instead of creating more waste for us and the planet.”

Leading change at work

Along the way, these “green teams” also are reducing operating costs, enhancing employee skills and morale, and improving patient and workplace safety. 

For example, the EVS department is now using environmentally friendly microfiber mops to clean a single patient room. This has the benefit of not spreading infections between rooms and preventing lifting and straining injuries caused by wringing traditional mops and hauling buckets of water.

The department also has started a project that is reducing the cost and trouble of replacing the 500 D-cell batteries used in the hospital restrooms’ automatic towel dispensers. The traditional batteries wore out in a matter of weeks—costing about $3,000 a year to replace and adding some 6,000 batteries a year to local waste or reprocessing streams. Starting in February 2012, workers installed new rechargeable batteries. Overall, EVS' green projects, including the use of rechargeable batteries, are saving an estimated $12,000 a year.

Enhancing skills, raising sights

“I feel better having conversations with anyone…doctors, nurses, I can tell them how to be green,” says EVS attendant Jose Velasco, an SEIU UHW member and a recent graduate of a green certification course offered at West Los Angeles Community College.

The program also was piloted at KP Riverside Medical Center, where the EVS unit-based team is reaching out to others with its newfound expertise. Now an EVS member is embedded with the Operating Room UBT—with others to follow—to help tackle waste and hygiene problems there.

The SEIU UHW-West & Joint Employer Education Fund and the Ben Hudnall Memorial Trust have helped underwrite the cost of the training for Kaiser Permanente’s LMP-represented workers. Eventually, frontline workers may be able to use their certifications for higher pay and promotions as medical center “green leads,” a program that would be negotiated between KP and the unions.

But the training already is making a difference to workers as well as to KP and the community. “They have more tools, more knowledge, so they are able to catch things,” says Angel Pacheco, management co-lead of the EVS UBT at Riverside. “We talked about saving the environment for future generations.”

In May 1951, Bay Area longshore workers participated in a groundbreaking medical program—the Multiphasic Screening Examination, the first comprehensive health assessment conducted in cooperation with a union.

The trustees of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union–Pacific Maritime Association (ILWU-PMA)Welfare Fund came up with the idea for the tests, thinking it would be a useful corollary to existing medical care by helping detect unsuspected chronic diseases so members could get early and effective treatment. The tests, given in the Local 10 offices, were designed to search out signs of lung cancer, tuberculosis, heart trouble, syphilis, diabetes, anemia, kidney trouble, and sight and hearing defects.

The trustees, together with the Local 10 welfare officer and the ILWU research department, worked out the program with the Permanente Health Plan. ILWU leader Harry Bridges promised results would be confidential and not affect job security, and complete follow-up care was assured as part of health plan coverage.

At 10:30 a.m. sharp, South Bay Medical Center appointment clerk Carolina Meza removes her telephone headset. She fires up what looks like the world’s tiniest iPod, attached to a portable speaker that’s not much bigger. She gathers four of her co-workers in a patch of open space near the coffee room. They do some neck rolls, march in place and then do a move Meza calls “the incredible hulk”—a shoulder stretch that brings welcome relief to those facing a computer screen for most of their day.

“When we go back to our stations, we feel refreshed,” says Meza, a member of SEIU UHW.

It’s called Instant Recess, and it’s the brainchild of Toni Yancey, MD, co-director of the UCLA Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity. It involves a quick, daily group exercise and is aimed at incorporating physical activity into a normal workday. It comes at a time when research is showing that workplace fitness initiatives targeting individual behavior (such as counseling and gym memberships) aren’t working. An organization’s whole infrastructure needs to be addressed, says Yancey. 

That’s what makes Instant Recess so appealing. It demonstrates KP’s commitment to Total Health—including for a healthy and safe work life for KP employees as well as the members and communities we serve. It’s consistent with KP’s Healthy Workforce push, and also seems to help reduce workplace injuries and improve attendance.

At the South Bay call center, for instance, annualized sick days fell almost one full day per full-time equivalent between 2010 and 2011, when the department began Instant Recess. The number of ergonomic injuries went from three to zero.  

Overcoming obstacles

While they are seeing results now, team members were wary when senior leaders at their medical center approached them about trying Instant Recess. “I was very skeptical,” says Darlene Zelaya, operations manager. “We can’t prevent the calls from coming in.” In fact, hold times for patients did go up when the team first implemented Instant Recess.

The unit-based team worked together with project manager Tiffany Creighton to adapt Instant Recess to their members’ needs. For instance, before calling a recess, team members check the reader board to assess how many agents can be off the phones at one time. They hold many small exercise bursts throughout the day instead of one or two longer ones. And they keep the music turned down low to avoid disturbing agents on the phone with patients.

Making it work locally

In the South Bay lab, Instant Recess looks and sounds totally different—but is getting similarly promising results. That department blasts a boom box for 10 full minutes during the Instant Recesses it incorporates into its huddles at shift change twice a day. Clinical lab scientist Nora Soriano steps away from her microscope to join in. She’s lost 43 pounds recently, and she partly credits Instant Recess. Soriano, a member of UFCW Local 770, says the initiative inspired her to exercise more at home. “My son got me an Xbox,” she says. “I don’t stop for half an hour, sometimes 45 minutes.”

Not all of Soriano’s co-workers were so enthused when they first heard about Instant Recess. “I was kind of negative,” admits Julia Ann Scrivens, a lab assistant and UHW member. “I thought, ‘I am so busy. You want me to do what?’ ” Area lab manager Dennis Edora says, “It was a shock. No one knew what to expect.” But the lab’s staff had just been through some stressful changes—including getting new equipment and moving to a new floor—and team members were hungry for something that would help rebuild morale.

“We collaborated with all the different job codes,” says Edora. “Everyone added their different flavor,” she says, noting that employees rotate as a leader, some choosing Hawaiian dance moves, others yoga-inspired stretches. “Instant Recess really got us together. It wasn’t just exercise.” Moreover, it was helping reduce injuries: the lab reported only one repetitive motion injury in 2011, after beginning Instant Recess in April. There were five such injuries in 2010.   

And Scrivens is sold as well. “It is fun,” she says. “It makes me happy.”