In a landmark move Catholic Healthcare West and the Service Employees International Union have reached a tentative agreement on a California-wide master contract covering 14,000 workers in 28 Catholic Healthcare West facilities across the state.

The four-year agreement includes an average wage increase of five percent a year and a $4 million training fund. The jointly operated fund will provide tuition reimbursement up to $3,000 a year and paid educational leave to help the hospitals and their employees meet --- from within --- the growing needs for skilled health care workers.

The agreement also provides employer-paid health insurance and significant increases in pension benefits.

In a June 2 media teleconference announcing details of the agreement, chief SEIU negotiator John Borsos said it gives health care workers a major voice in staffing and other decisions affecting the quality of patient care.

He said the agreement provides for each facility to have a joint committee, with equal numbers of managers and union members, to work out such issues. Disputes that cannot be settled by the committee will be settled by a neutral health care expert.

The health care system and the union also agreed to work together on public policy issues such as legislation on wider access to health care.

Borsos, who is administrative vice president of the union, said the statewide master contract merges 14 separate SEIU contracts previously reached with Catholic Healthcare West facilities.

Catholic Healthcare West, formed by a partnership of several Catholic religious orders of women, oversees 41 acute care hospitals in California, Arizona and Nevada. It is the largest health care employer in California.

Catholic hospitals within the Archdiocese of Los Angeles covered by this agreement include St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, St. John's Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo, and St. John's Regional Medical Center in Oxnard.

Jill Dryer, communications director for the Catholic health care group, said the new agreement "will not only benefit the employees, but the patients." She called the jointly administered educational fund "one of the great features in the overall contract."

"It's going to provide some great career development opportunities for our employees," she added. "That's something that the union has indicated is important to them and clearly it's very important to us. So if we can work together on that, we're all for it."

She said some of the individual contracts with SEIU had provided for management-worker committees to deal with issues of staffing and patient care, and the new master agreement extends that to all the facilities.

Dryer said what the union counted as 28 facilities was 25 by Catholic Healthcare West's count, but the discrepancy was probably the result of the union counting as two facilities some places that the health care group thinks of as one unit with two campuses.

Ratification votes are being conducted at the hospitals between June 7 and 11, but union workers participating in the teleconference used words like "wonderful" and "amazing" to describe the agreement and indicated they expected overwhelming acceptance.

Three SEIU locals --- 250 in northern California and 121RN and 399 in the southern part of the state --- joined forces in the statewide bargaining.

"This is an amazing contract," said Ingela Dahlgren, a registered nurse who works in critical care at Northridge Hospital Medical Center in Northridge. Dahlgren, a nurse for 30 years, said a 50 percent increase in pension benefits "makes me much more secure about retiring with dignity."

Sal Rosselli, president of SEIU Local 250, said a shortage of nurses and other health care personnel is a major problem facing hospitals throughout California.

A 20 percent annual turnover in personnel statewide forces California's hospitals to spend an estimated $2 billion a year on training, recruitment and retention, he said, and the higher pay scales and benefits in the new contract should help Catholic Healthcare West keep a more stable, long-term work force.

Paul Matakiewicz, a respiratory therapist for 20 years at St. John's Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, said the level of patient care "isn't the optimum" when health care workers leave for better paying jobs and the hospital has to keep retraining newly-hired nurses and therapists.

The higher pay scales, education fund and retirement benefits will result in better retention rates that in turn "improves patient care greatly," said Matakiewicz. "You have a more productive employee who's well trained and comfortable in their job position."

Martha Vazquez, a radiology technician at St. Joseph Medical Center in Stockton, said workers and management there "have a good relationship," but the hospital was regularly losing workers to neighboring hospitals that offered better wages and fringe benefits.

She said the new contract puts St. Joseph's workers on a par with the others and will improve staff retention. She saw the educational fund as "forging a new relationship" in which workers benefit from career advancement opportunities while the hospital can use the employee training to "ensure staffing in needed positions."

Ellie Hidalgo contributed to this story.