Kaiser Permanente and the Alliance of Health Care Unions
LMPartnership.org

Humans of Partnership

portrait of Patrica de la Riva, MD
“In 1999, I joined the Woodland Hills Medical Center’s LMP Council and was asked to help lead the council’s work on culturally competent care. My ‘aha’ moment about partnership came when I realized you need buy-in from everybody to get things done. As a physician, you think, ‘I can do what I want.’ But when we brought interpreters into the exam room, we needed support from frontline staff, the department administrator and physicians. Without partnership, the workflow is inconsistent, systems are not addressed and patient care is fragmented. Conversely, when I’m in a department where I’m working with labor and management and we’re all on the same page, then the delivery of medical care works well for our patients, staff, managers and physicians. ”
Patricia de la Riva, MD, assistant area medical director and physician LMP champion (Southern California)
portrait of Julia Howard
“In 1997, I was the lead pharmacy tech and a shop steward for UAW Local 600 at a hospital in Detroit. I started at KP in 2005—before unit-based teams. Not everyone was on board with partnership. There was no team. We had no input. Once, we had an issue with an employee who was rude and made the workplace hostile. I spoke to her manager, who did nothing. It improved after several meetings and once I filed a grievance. The difference now is you come together right away, on one accord. Managers realize we work as a team. We discuss issues without fear of retaliation—before, you felt retaliation. It’s wonderful now that we have UBTs with managers fully participating. When we come to the table, everyone’s title is off. We are all the same. ”
Julia Howard, certified pharmacy technician, Brookwood at Peachtree Medical Office, UFCW Local 1996 (Georgia)
current portrait of Larson Paul B. Layugan, with an inset of him as a kid in a Power Ranger costume
“Twenty years ago, I was in the fifth grade pretending to be a Power Ranger!!! I always knew I wanted to do something medical related or something that involved teaching people. As a senior UBT consultant, I get the best of both worlds. I can help improve health care while teaching my peers about the LMP. The LMP has helped many people to understand their role here at Kaiser Permanente. It helps the front line to develop their leadership skills and really take ownership and accountability over how their department performs. It’s empowering to know that this model not only improves the member experience, but also helps to grow and nurture future leaders.”
Larson Paul B. Layugan, RN, MSN, senior UBT consultant (Hawaii)
portrait of Lilian Cates, with inset photo of her when she was a girl
“In 1997, I was starting to develop the confidence to ask important questions about life, like, “Do my glasses really need to be this huge?” Seventeen years later, in 2014, I started at Kaiser Permanente as a customer service representative in the Denver Member Service Contact Center. As an SEIU Local 105 labor leader, I found my passion for innovation through partnership, and I am honored to continue that work today as a consultant with KP Colorado’s Patient Experience team.”
Lilian (Lily) Cates, consultant, Patient Experience team (Colorado)
portrait of Denice Washington
“At the beginning, some people laughed at this partnership. It was a wild idea—the concept of having a venue where the workers would have a voice was unique. How are we going to make that happen? I look at it as a marriage. We liked each other. We started dating. We courted a bit. Then we got engaged, and now we’re married. We went through some not-easy times. Labor had to look at our relationship with management. Management had to look at its relationship with labor. You have to work at a marriage every day. A lot of the success of a marriage has to do with communication and how you engage with your partner. There are hard conversations that have to happen, and you’ve got to have the ability to trust your partner and be open and receptive to ideas. I have non-Kaiser Permanente clients in the adversarial world, so I juggle. But when I go from adversarial to partnership, it’s great. I’m high on communication and engagement—and working together, in partnership.”
Denice Washington, business representative and labor co-lead to the Northern California LMP Steering Committee, OPEIU Local 29 (Northern California)
portrait of Rebecca Rojas
“I used to wear a lot of hats, but I’ve scaled back so that I can focus more intently on what I’m working on. I’m a unit-based team labor sponsor. One of our challenges is being able to meet so we do many things around communication so people know what’s going on. We distribute meeting minutes and sign an attestation that we’ve read the minutes and we use a visual board that shows our goals and where we are on reaching those goals. We also use data so that we are empowered to make change and we can see the impact. It’s a small piece but it impacts the big picture.”
Rebecca Rojas, RN, UBT labor sponsor, Hawaii Nurses Association, OPEIU Local 50 (Hawaii)

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