Employees of a Mental Health Partners facility in Boulder said they will soon hold a vote on whether or not to unionize.
If the vote succeeds, people who work at the nonprofit group’s crisis and addiction center at 3180 Airport Road will affiliate with Service Employees International Union Local 105 and become the first unionized mental health and substance use facility in the city. Mental Health Partners has several facilities around the county.
The center on Airport Road is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and offers free walk-in services to people experiencing a crisis, including unhoused individuals, domestic violence survivors, students and others. There also is a detox clinic on-site that serves acutely intoxicated or detoxing clients.
Several clinicians from the facility told the Daily Camera that staffing issues, a possible 10% pay cut on the horizon and unsafe working conditions have created a dire situation that needs to be addressed for the sake of clients and staff.
Chronic understaffing has led to long shifts at work — often lasting 13 to 15 hours at a time, though two clinicians said they once worked a 20-hour day — that leave clinicians feeling exhausted and unable to attend to their personal needs.
One of the crisis clinicians, Mitra van Vuren, said that during the eight years she has worked there, the clinic has had trouble keeping staff for very long. The clinic closed for several months in 2022 because there simply weren’t enough staff to keep it open.
“They have had trouble (with) retaining people,” van Vuren said. “A lot of really good clinicians have left, which is a shame, because we’re also a teaching facility. We take interns and teach them to do this work.”
And sometimes, when there aren’t enough other staff around, staff members can find themselves in dangerous situations. Another clinician, Ashley Smith, who has worked at the clinic on and off for about four years, said she has seen conditions at the clinic change for the worse over the past few years and that it’s now reached a “tipping point.”
Smith said she sometimes works shifts where there is only one clinician on-duty. That can become a safety issue at times, especially when clients are aggressive, intoxicated or having psychotic episodes. While therapists are trained to verbally de-escalate interactions with clients, there have been times when staff have needed to call police to intervene, according to Smith.
“We don’t have security. We don’t have video monitoring to make sure our clinicians are safe. We’re having to sometimes go two at a time in a room with a client just to make sure that one of us isn’t going to be assaulted,” she said.
Van Vuren said detox staff have been physically assaulted in the past and that clinic staff have also experienced death threats and threats of their cars being vandalized.
Nate Paer, a licensed addiction counselor, said that apart from hospitals, the clinic is “the only 24/7 safety net service” in Boulder and Broomfield counties, but he wants to see the clinic become a safer place for staff and clients. He said believes many of the issues are systemic within the mental health industry and aren’t unique to the clinic where he works.
All three clinicians said they believe strongly in the work they do and want to see these services continue to be offered for the community, but the current conditions have become unsustainable and need to change.
“We want to help people through the hardest times. Basically, what we’re trying to do is just have adequate staffing and security in place to ensure that we can continue to do that,” Paer said.
Added van Vuren, “We’d like to hold the light steady for clients, but the ground underneath has to be stable.”
The clinicians said there’s strong support among employees for unionization. The union election will be held by mail-in ballots, which will be sent out on Friday. Paer said he expects votes to be tallied, and the union election results shared, by May 21.
Reached for comment, Dixie Casford, co-CEO of Mental Health Partners, said in a written statement the company values its employees and actively works to address their concerns.
“As the entire health and human services sector comes together to navigate workforce shortages, cost of living increases, and funding challenges, we will never stop advocating for our employees and our clients,” Casford wrote.
“In line with this support, we support our employees’ right to choose whether they want to be unionized or not. Regardless of the outcome of the election, we will continue to provide a positive and desirable place to work so that we may persist in advancing access to excellent behavioral healthcare in safe, welcoming environments.”
