DHA MACF Intakes and Rescheduling
Greetings Union Family,
On September 30, 2026, your 008 governing board met with DHA management for the second time to discuss the volume of Medi-Cal/CalFresh intakes and a streamlined process for rescheduling intakes when requested by a worker.
We spent hours explaining to management that workers do not have enough time to complete intakes. If the department is not going to extend intake slot times, then they need to allow and respect worker discretion for rescheduling when intakes take longer than scheduled and may spill over into the next appointment. As of now, management tells workers to hold their appointments that need rescheduling until the end of the day. This is not a rescheduling process. This puts pressure on the workers to “try their best” and complete all of the appointments.
The department seemed to hear us a little more than last time, and agreed to the following proposals we made:
When a worker needs their appointment rescheduled, they will email their supervisor, SOD, and buddy supervisor stating their appointment needs to be rescheduled, with a reason why. If a supervisor does not think the appointment needs to be rescheduled, they have to provide the reason why to the worker. Management emphasized “oversight is necessary,” but by providing a reason why they are not going to reschedule it, we can escalate it if it is unreasonable.
The supervisors will have to respond within 15 minutes, and if not, the request can be escalated to a program manager. At the end of the day, if a supervisor has not rescheduled, and the worker does not want to stay past the end of their shift, they can tell the client that someone will get back to them. They can then email their supervisor to let them know and leave for the day.
Any appointments that were not rescheduled and remained on schedule, even if they were meant to be rescheduled, the supervisor will reschedule those. The worker is not expected to carry those over.
Workers will not be disciplined for utilizing the rescheduling process, in and of itself. Workers will not get in trouble for asking for reschedules. It is going to happen pretty regularly since workers do not have enough time, and we want to ensure workers do not get in trouble for a systemic issue.
We made it clear to management that the current process is unacceptable and has led to workers missing a break or working through their lunch.
Finally, we also mentioned how workers will not be blocked off from scheduling even if they come into work late. For example, if a worker calls in that they are arriving at 9 am, their 8:30 appointment will still be on the calendar. We told management that workers need to be blocked from receiving appointments for times they are not in the office. They said they are working on system updates in LIMS, as this should not be happening.
In the meantime, the worker can ask for that appointment to be rescheduled, or for their next one to be rescheduled if they do not have enough time.
If you have any questions about these changes, please contact your Business Agent. We hope this can fix the broken process, and that this provides some long-awaited relief to our workers when they need it. If it does not work out, we will request to meet again.
UPE thanks the following members for their advocacy: Michelle Moyer, Nichole Gorman, Olivia Brown, and Tony DeRego.
TOGETHER WE'RE STRONG!
