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Oxnard City Council considers admonishing St. John’s hospital for outsourcing jobs

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Oxnard City Council considers admonishing St. John’s hospital for outsourcing jobs

The Oxnard City Council will vote Tuesday on whether to urge the parent company of a local hospital to stop replacing onsite employees with a remote heart monitoring system operated in Arizona.

Council members will consider a resolution that calls on CommonSpirit Health to cease “outsourcing” jobs at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard via a centralized monitoring unit launched earlier this year. The proposed resolution cites alleged life-threatening patient safety issues and critical communication gaps.

It asserts the “remote system prioritizes a wrong approach to the needs of Oxnard’s vulnerable patients, and puts patients at risk of delays in care.”

The city measure would carry no authority over CommonSpirit or nonprofit St. John’s. But Espie Velasco, a steward with the SEIU-United Healthcare Workers union that represents the hospital’s heart monitoring techs, contends the action would be a “homerun”  in the ongoing fight to bring back the on-site heart monitor technicians who have been assigned to other jobs.

“I think the hospital will feel pressure,” she said.

St. John’s officials did not respond to requests for comment but have earlier asserted the remote system enhances patient safety in part by using high-tech tools, including artificial intelligence.

“This new technology reduces the amount of false alarms and provides a clear picture of what is happening with a patient’s cardiac rhythm,” hospital spokesperson Christina Zicklin said in a May statement.

The remote system went live at St. John’s Regional in April and is also planned for St. John’s Hospital Camarillo. Monitoring is conducted at a centralized site in Phoenix manned by technicians and nurses who supervise them. Bedside nurses are notified of any potential issue like code blues that show the heart has stopped.

When the system first started, about 20 onsite heart monitor techs worked at St. John’s in Oxnard. At first, they continued their duties, tracking patients and backing up the remote efforts.

But now nearly all of them have been reassigned, some to lower-paying positions, Velasco said. At least one worker retired. A handful of the employees continue to work as heart monitor techs and have been assigned to the hospital’s direct observation unit.

In May, monitor techs and other union members spoke to the City Council, asserting the remote system had already brought instances where heart issues haven’t been immediately detected, triggering potentially fatal delays in care.

Robin Sanders, one of the former heart monitor techs, said at a City Council committee meeting in September she realized and reported a patient’s heart rate had stopped several minutes before it was revealed by the remote system. The quick response gave nurses a chance to perform CPR immediately though the patient ultimately died.

“What if that was you on the floor? What if that was your heart that stopped? Would you want to wait the three minutes to get the help you need or do you want someone who is able to call a code and get you that help in seconds?” she asked.

St. John’s officials have said the remote system is the wave of the future. Barry Wolfman, then CEO of St. John’s, said in an email to hospital employees in May that the system detects changes in a patient’s status and provides critical information to doctors.

“By leveraging this new technology, our community now has access to the most advanced and safest cardiac monitoring system available,” he said.

Oxnard Mayor John Zaragoza worries about potentially fatal care delays. He said on Thursday he plans to vote in favor of the resolution.

“To me, it’s more of a lifeline item, a patient safety issue,” he said. “We have to take care of our people here.”

In the September committee meeting, Zaragoza and Councilmember Oscar Madrigal voted to send the resolution to the full council for a vote. Councilmember Bryan MacDonald voted in opposition.

“I don’t know that the city of Oxnard should really be telling a medical facility how to run a facility,” MacDonald said Friday, declining to reveal how he’ll vote on Tuesday.  “I don’t think the city has any expertise in running a (medical) facility.”

The proposed resolution also calls for CommonSpirit to involve nurses and other frontline health workers in decisions that directly impact patient care.

Tom Kisken covers health care and other news for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tom.kisken@vcstar.com.

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