Charges of unfair labor practices filed against Peak Vista Community Health Centers (2025)

A union that represents licensed doctors and advanced-practice clinicians is calling on the National Labor Relations Board to investigate what is being described as punitive and fearful retaliatory workplace protocols at Colorado Springs-headquartered Peak Vista Community Health Centers.

Charges of unfair labor practices filed Tuesday by attorneys representing the Sacramento, Calif.-based Union of American Physicians and Dentists comes in the wake of six Peak Vista providers being fired over the past two and a half weeks and at least four voluntarily quitting, according to sources.

Stories of doctors being removed from exam rooms in front of patients and then immediately fired in the hallways have been circulating. Some employees who spoke to The Gazette say they believe they were terminated after speaking out against new productivity mandates or being involved with starting a union.

“It’s not unusual to set expectations; these are unusually high, and the punishment is unusually severe,” said Andrew Guttman, a representative of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists.

Peak Vista, which provides medical, dental and behavioral health care for low-income and indigent residents at 22 outpatient clinics, is in receipt of the filing and is investigating, the organization’s president and CEO, Dr. Emily Ptaszek, said in a statement sent to The Gazette in response to a request for comments.

“We take these accusations very seriously and are confident they are unfounded,” she said. “At Peak Vista, we strive for organizational excellence and adhere to the shared values of respect, stewardship and teamwork among nearly 800 team members serving 74,000 patients, many of whom have barriers to quality health care.”

Peak Vista enacted a requirement that began Jan. 1 for physicians, physicians’ assistants, nurse practitioners, psychologists and other prescribing mental health providers to see more patients on a daily basis above the national median.

On top of that, administrators told providers if they did not reach the new expectations, they would need to extend their remaining workdays for the rest of the year or forgo paid time off to make up for the shortfall in patient visits.

Such action constitutes “unlawful rules and provisions,” correlating to “sudden discharge or retaliation” and thereby violates employees’ rights, according to the charges submitted to the federal labor agency.

In her statement, Ptaszek said, “We are committed to a healthy workplace where performance goals and timely health care service delivery is a top priority.”

The demands administrators have made were “based solely on projected expenses and not workforce capacity,” reads a letter Union President Dr. Stuart Bussey sent Tuesday to Peak Vista’s board of directors.

Providers were told that increasing patient encounters was the only way to address the organization’s financial struggles, Bussey said in his letter. The organization’s 990 tax filings show an excess of $11 million in revenue over expenses in 2021 and $4.6 million more revenue than expenses in 2022. Tax statements from 2023 are not yet publicly available.

Nonetheless, providers stepped up and increased daily scheduled patient encounters from 22 to 28, former employees said. The organization’s administrators also reduced the time that could be spent with each patient to 15 minutes.

The industry’s median productivity is 20 patients per day, said a family practice provider, who was recently terminated from Peak Vista and requested anonymity.

“If we didn’t, we were labeled as unproductive and bullied to do additional work without pay— which a lot of us felt it was inappropriate, and some of us refused to do it,” the family practice provider said. “We started talking about organizing with a union, and the firings came within a week of that. My firing came very abruptly and left my clinic without a provider.”

It’s been rough,said a longtime pediatrician who also recently was terminated and asked not to be named because she fears retribution.

“To make 22 encounters a day, you have to schedule 28-30 clients a day, figuring in a 9% to 11% no-show rate. The day all 28 show up is a really bad day,” she said. “It’s not ideal care. It’s been so focused on the numbers, the guarantee of quality care has been harder and harder to reach.”

And regardless of whether a patient has a sore throat or a tracheotomy tube, “you have 15 minutes. Period,” she said.

The pediatrician said her contract for this year stipulated she provide 4,004 patient encounters, which she said meant she had to use lunch time or after-hours time at home to complete administrative paperwork and other duties.

“Everybody was like ‘What the heck is going on? I don’t want to do that,’” the doctor said.

Asking providers to see more patients in a given time isn’t new at Peak Vista. A few years ago, the organization upped the number of patient encounters from 23 to nearly 30, said a former employee who was laid off two-and-a-half years ago.

“That made it very difficult to see a patient in a healthy and productive way,” the employee said.

He complained about rule, was told he needed to reapply for his job as an operations director, then was informed he wasn’t qualified for that job or any other position at the organization.

The main problem with the rash of recent terminations of doctors who worked in different capacities at Peak Vista clinics that are scattered about the Pikes Peak region and Eastern Colorado is that about 20,000 underserved children and adults are left without their familiar physician, the former operations director said.

"To me, that is a disservice to the community," he said.

The union is calling for the board of Peak Vista to stop the “assembly line medicine and the sweatshop atmosphere at the clinics,” as well as halt alleged retaliation against providers and allow them the lawful right to unionize, according to Bussey’s letter.