UHW Helps Launch Partnership for Quality Care

On May 2, SEIU in partnership with the nation's largest healthcare providers launched a joint effort to seek healthcare reform across the United States, though a new coalition called the Partnership for Quality Care.

The partnership includes SEIU's United Healthcare Workers-West and 1199 United Healthcare Workers-East, as well as public, private, religious, teaching, and nonprofit hospitals, and several integrated health systems. Three of the four healthcare systems represented in the partnership are based in California: Catholic Healthcare West, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, and Daughters of Charity Health System. Combined, the partnership's members care for more than 45 million patients annually.

"No one knows better than frontline caregivers how broken our healthcare system is and the reforms we need to repair it," said Sal Rosselli, President of SEIU UHW-West. "With this new partnership, we are taking the relationships our members developed with major health systems in California to a much deeper level to achieve universal health coverage for our patients and our communities."

The partnership will work in 2007 and 2008 to bring the message of universal healthcare to communities and elected representatives. One of its first steps is meeting with members of Congress to expand funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program, also known as SCHIP, which would allow states to cut the number of uninsured children in the country in half over the next five years.

"Americans today expect meaningful reform and an improved healthcare system," said Lloyd Dean, president and CEO of Catholic Healthcare West. "It will take leadership and partnerships such as this one to help us move forward."