It’s not surprising California Pacific Medical Center’s own dialysis patients in San Francisco are fighting plans to outsource their dialysis services to a for-profit corporation — DaVita — despite intense objections, or consent, from CPMC’s dialysis patients.
Patients have been asking questions for over nine months.
They haven’t been getting reasonable answers.
“CPMC reported over $170 million in profit last year, so there’s no financial necessity to cut services. It’s well-documented that for-profit dialysis centers have higher mortality rates than non-profit dialysis services,” says Nato Green, a labor representative for the California Nurses Association.
As this Examiner has previously reported, dialysis services are at great risk in San Francisco.
Given real safety concerns about outsourcing dialysis services, it’s also not surprising that patients would organize themselves to oppose outsourcing their dialysis treatments.
Tatiana Kostanian — who has served on the Mayor’s Disability Council for seven years — is disturbed by CPMC’s plan to outsource its dialysis services to DaVita.
Speaking directly in her role as a dialysis patient herself and as a disability rights advocate since 1962 — not in her role as a member of the Mayor’s Disability Council — Kostanian says “With one foot already on the banana peel, those of us who receive our dialysis treatments at CMPC have long worried about how it will get disabled people in wheelchairs and beds down the stairs of their facility in a disaster.”
For dialysis patients, it may be a matter of life or death, in part because procedures for how a private contractor will provide “code blue” services within a hospital have not been developed, let alone communicated to the very patients who wonder what the process will be if they go code blue.
If CPMC’s plans are approved, rather than calling CPMC’s medical staff to respond to patients who go into code blue, DaVita may have to call 9-1-1 asking that an ambulance service be sent to the scene, wasting precious minutes before an agency responds.
By then, it may be too late.
As they “code,” patients may wonder why they’re facing death, while corporations worry about who will assume responsibility for “liability” issues.
This smacks of multiple organizations worrying about “legal liability” issues, more than they are worrying about providing the appropriate level of care that could prevent libiaility problems in the first place.
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