Hospitals: employee identification.

Assembly Member Patterson's hospital employee identification measure establishes new requirements for name badges worn by patient-facing staff in California's general acute care and psychiatric hospitals. The legislation requires hospitals to implement policies mandating identification tags that display both the employee's vocational classification or license status and their name in 18-point type or larger.

The bill provides hospitals flexibility in how employee names appear on identification badges, allowing four options: full first and last name, first name with last initial, first initial with last name, or either first or last name alone. This approach aims to balance professional identification standards with employee privacy and safety concerns, particularly in psychiatric settings where existing regulations permit practitioners to forgo name tags due to security considerations.

Under the measure, hospitals must ensure all employees who interact with patients wear compliant identification badges while on duty. The State Department of Public Health would oversee implementation through its existing hospital licensing and regulatory framework, with violations treated as infractions under current health facility laws. While the bill creates new requirements for local health facilities, it specifies that no state reimbursement is required for compliance costs, as these fall under exemptions related to crime definition changes in the California Constitution.