Subcontracting Med Center duties is dirty business

By Luu Doan

UCLA officials are planning to subcontract critical services
that might leave our hospital with unsanitary linen and insecure
medical information.

Imagine waking up groggy after surgery at the UCLA Medical
Center. You feel comfortable knowing UCLA provides some of the best
medical care in the world. Then, imagine rolling over in your
narrow little hospital bed and noticing a spot on the corner of
your sheet. It’s blood, and it’s definitely not yours.
You think to yourself, just how “sterile” is this
environment? You ask a nurse’s assistant to change your
sheets immediately, but she informs you that there was a mix-up in
the laundry deliveries and the hospital will not have clean linen
for another few hours.

Later a nurse comes to see how you’re doing and gives you
a dose of your post-operative antibiotics. Within minutes you
develop a reaction. Your skin becomes swollen and red, and your
bronchioles constrict making it harder and harder to breathe by the
second. You hit the nurse’s call button right before you pass
out. When you finally awake from the traumatic experience, you
discover that you were given penicillin, an antibiotic to which you
are highly allergic. There was a mix-up with your medical records,
and for this reason, the doctor was not informed before it was
prescribed.

Quite a horror story, isn’t it? But this would never
really happen ““ or could it?

Due to recent changes made by UCLA officials, your next trip to
the hospital might leave you a lot less healthy. These executives
want to save a few bucks by subcontracting the UCLA Laundry
Facility and Medical Records Department to private outside
agencies.

University officials at UC San Francisco subcontracted out their
laundry facility, and according to the American Federation of
State, County and Municipal Employees, the hospital sometimes ended
up with sheets soiled in blood, urine and feces. There have been
occasions when the private agency even mixed up patient laundry
with linen that was used for animal experiments. There is potential
for even greater damage if similar mistakes are made with sensitive
and confidential medical information.

As a graduating senior of UCLA and a patient of UCLA’s
medical facilities, I was deeply disturbed upon hearing of possible
changes in UCLA’s medical care.

There are three critical issues that could hurt UCLA’s
ability to provide top-notch patient care. First, the current
employees at the laundry facility have dedicated their lives to
making sure each and every sheet arrives at the hospital on time
and sterile. This work forms the basis of a clean environment where
linen is reused again and again between patients of varying
afflictions. Their efficiency prevents the spread of nosocomial
infections, which describes the spread of disease within a
hospital.

Similarly, quality health care is not possible without accurate
and secure information about a patient’s medical history. A
small detail overlooked in a patient’s chart can cost a
patient their life. The current staff at UCLA’s Medical
Records has consistently provided excellent medical service.

Why would we want to invite possibly inexperienced and
over-worked workers into these departments?

The second issue to consider is the welfare of the subcontracted
employee. UCLA is seriously endangering the health of its
prospective employees because private agencies are not required to
provide health benefits. Hospital linen is, more often than not,
contaminated with a myriad of biohazardous material. These
materials include blood, infectious bodily fluids, and toxic
chemotherapeutic agents, to name a few. Many times, needles
accidentally left on the beds or the linens from highly contagious
isolation rooms are not properly contained.

How can UCLA consider hiring new employees to take care of these
duties and deny them any access to health insurance? How can the
institution deny the workers the same patient care they play an
important role in providing? With the high rates of AIDS,
Hepatitis, and Tuberculosis, the logic behind this decision is not
only negligent, but inhumane.

Last, but certainly not least, is the issue of the almost 100
workers at the UCLA Laundry Facility and Medical Records
Department. One worker, Sandra MacVikar, has worked at the Laundry
Facility for more than 18 years. She is a single mother who has to
work to support herself and her son. MacVikar is 55 years old, and
she, like many of our parents, imagines a day not too far off when
she will be able to retire and enjoy the rest of her life.

Recent changes, however, have made this dream little more than a
fantasy. Why would UCLA officials want to destroy the lives of so
many workers who have given their everything to the university?

It does, in a sordid way, make sense that UCLA would name the
new hospital after Ronald Reagan, who was always willing to save a
few bucks off the backs of workers and put profit before patient
care. It only parallels the anti-union sentiment that is quickly
spreading throughout the UCLA community.

But how much will UCLA really be saving by contracting out these
departments? According to AFSCME, it currently costs UCLA 54 cents
to properly clean, sterilize and fold one pound of hospital
laundry. This includes soap and water, as well as the labor of UCLA
employers who receive a realistic living wage and benefits. One of
the agencies competing for the contract has agreed to do the same
job for 53 cents a pound. For Medical Records, an outside agency
has offered to operate the department for 5 percent less.

Whether it’s one penny or 5 percent less, I am shocked
that the university is willing to compromise patient care and
eliminate good jobs. At the same time, top officials at the UC
recently received a 22 percent raise, with some salaries averaging
more than $270,000.

This is only the beginning of UCLA’s process of
subcontracting. Subcontracting is a growing trend to save the
corporate dollar. As UCLA students, we cannot passively feed money
into an institution which cannot “afford” to fairly
compensate the very workers who keep the university running. It is
critical to act now, before UCLA becomes an institution completely
run by temporary and casual employees. This week, more than 100
career university employees are getting ready to face the
unemployment lines. New employees wait to enter jobs which parallel
sweatshops. And, our medical facilities look forward to adopting
the name of a president who did nothing for working class
people.

As members of the university community, we now have the
opportunity to challenge UCLA to oppose sweatshops right here on
our campus. Let us tell the university to keep good jobs and
quality patient care here, and not in the hands of some private
agency.