At the request of SEIU 1021 President Theresa Rutherford, United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra visited Laguna Honda Hospital to meet with SEIU 1021 members, members of other labor unions representing hospital workers, and Laguna Honda patients last Friday, February 24, 2023.

Secretary Becerra met the workers who keep Laguna Honda Hospital running and signaled his commitment to saving Laguna Honda from closure, but the hard work to recertify has to be done. 

Laguna Honda’s status is in a difficult situation. The hospital’s highest priorities are to keep Laguna Honda open and to work with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to recertify the hospital into its Medicare and Medicaid Provider Participation Program. Even while we continue to work on recertification, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is requiring that Laguna Honda at the same time submit a closure and transfer plan to continue funding to care for patients. The plan requires the hospital to assess patients and prepare to transfer them.

Debbie Dobson, a certified nursing assistant with over twenty years of experience working for the City and County of San Francisco, spoke about the difficult work that SEIU 1021 members put into making Laguna Honda Hospital a vital center for health care.

“Laguna Honda has dedicated, hard-working staff, doing backbreaking work to provide a safe home and services and care to our residents,” Debbie Dobson said to Secretary Becerra during his visit last Friday. “We provide more and better services than any other facility. So, we don’t want to discharge our residents to those places. They don’t have what we have. They don’t have as much. The residents will lose out. The voters of San Francisco voted to pay for a bond measure to rebuild this place, which is a really good place that provides excellent care for people.”

Seeing how Laguna Honda Hospital is run up close and personal, Secretary Becerra expressed his commitment to working with SEIU 1021 members to ensure that the hospital remains open and continues to provide the vital health care services San Franciscans deserve.

“I need your help,” Secretary Becerra said to SEIU 1021 members. “When you say this is the best place, some surveyors came at the request of Laguna Honda, who said that that’s not the case, that it’s the case that there have been enough deficiencies that you may not qualify to get the funding. It may be too difficult. We have to live with that fact. That’s the evidence that we’re being presented. What I saw, though, was that many of the deficiencies were not the infrastructure, wasn’t even the commitment of the people. It was that the changes in the way to do things hadn’t been totally adopted, and so the markdowns are coming because of very minute, distinct things that will take the personnel—the people—to make it work right.”

All SEIU 1021 hospital members are vital in keeping Laguna Honda open. We must work together to address the issues federal and state regulators raise, including at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the California Department of Public Health. SEIU 1021 members will be a part of significant changes at Laguna Honda - not just to get the hospital recertified – but to ensure that we see the transformational change that will allow the hospital to continue serving patients for future generations.