Nurses and other hospital workers of the Seton Medical Center staged a vigil last week to protest the proposed closure of the emergency care services and critical care unit. “These nurses behind me, we are all nurses, and we want to keep the hospital open and to be of service to the community. There are a lot of senior citizens in the area especially Filipino people. This is 90 percent Filipino community so they should advocate that Seton will be an acute hospital," said Tessie Cachola, a run staff nurse at Seton for 30 years said. The Daughters of Charity Health System, which owns Seton, reportedly can longer afford to fund the services.

National Nurses United has launched a media campaign criticizing the effects of what it called “digitalized care.” The mutlipronged campaign specifically criticizes electronic health records and bedside computers, saying they “too often fail” and lead to diagnoses and treatments based on “generic population trends” instead of individualized assessments.

National Nurses United has been running ads on TV and radio lately about the obvious dangers of a troubling trend in our increasingly corporatized, for-profit healthcare system (consisting of the large hospital chains and health insurance cartels), replacing nurses and doctors with computerized diagnostics and protocols, which must be rigidly followed.

The California Nurses Association is calling on Contra Costa County residents to demand county leaders save Doctor's Medical Center in San Pablo from certain closure. The hospital is set to close in July after years of financial struggles and the failure of West Contra Costa County voters to pass a parcel tax that might have kept the facility open.

In a bid to make healthcare cheaper and faster, hospitals are turning to algorithmic systems for diagnosing patients. But the national nurses' union says that robots-meet-super-WebMD are no replacement for a real doctor.