America's newest doctors fuel efforts to unionize

[havoc00]

Doctors employed by Delaware’s dominant medical system, ChristianaCare, have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to vote on forming a union, WHYY News has learned.

Two-thirds of the more than 400 physicians who are on staff at the health care system’s main Delaware operations — Christiana and Wilmington hospitals, Helen F. Graham Cancer Center and the Middletown stand-alone emergency care center — signed cards seeking authorization to hold an election, union organizers said. The petition, which only required a 30% vote, was delivered to the NLRB office in Philadelphia late Tuesday.

The union would be the first in the 136-year history of ChristianaCare, Delaware’s largest private employer with about 11,600 staff members. Should the doctors elect to form a union, the next step would be collective bargaining on a contract to address duties, wages and other issues.

Dr. Ragu Sanjeev, a ChristianaCare internist and leader in the unionization effort, told WHYY News in an exclusive interview that he and his colleagues are taking the unprecedented step because physicians have been overworked to the point that many have left ChristianaCare, and that administrators have not addressed concerns about understaffing coming out of the pandemic.

“We have still not been able to staff up enough to where us physicians can get back to just focusing on taking care of patients,” Sanjeev said. “We all went to med school to primarily take good care of patients and keeping them healthy and getting them better once they get into the hospital, especially when they are at their sickest. And because of the hospital’s mismanagement of its employees, especially physicians, a lot of good doctors [who are] well-respected in the community have been leaving.

https://whyy.org/articles/christiana...filed-burnout/




A new generation of doctors struggling with ever-increasing workloads and crushing student debt is helping drive unionization efforts in a profession that historically hasn't organized.

Why it matters: Physicians in training, like their peers in other industries, increasingly see unions as a way to boost their pay and protect themselves against grueling working conditions as they launch their careers.

It also comes amid a wave of unionization and labor actions by nurses and other caregivers across a health care system that's still dealing with high levels of burnout.
What they're saying: "We deserve an increased salary to be able to afford to live in one of the most expensive areas in the United States," said Ali Duffens, a third-year internal medicine resident at Kaiser Permanente's San Francisco Medical Center.

She's among the 400 residents at Kaiser's Northern California system filing to unionize earlier this month.
Duffens earns about $82,000 per year, while paying $3,000 a month for rent and facing $350,000 in medical school loans.
The big picture: The Kaiser residents are part of a growing number of younger peers in medicine who have been unionizing in recent years.

The number of medical residents in unions has about doubled to more than 32,000 in three years, per CalMatters.
In the last year, residents at Montefiore Medical Center, Stanford Health Care, George Washington University and the University of Pennsylvania voted to unionize, per WBUR.
"The cost of day care ... in a month is about half of my salary in total, and the cost of a nanny is essentially the entirety of my salary," Leah Rethy, an internal medicine resident with Penn Medicine, told NPR last year.
Residents can work as much as 80 hours per week while earning far less than their older colleagues.
Yes, but: Just about 6%-7% of physicians are estimated to be in unions.

Historically, doctors have thought they could just suck up the long hours and relatively low pay in training as part of the tradition of medicine, said Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
"For a new generation, they look at it and say, 'That's crazy. I can't believe you did that. I want to work hard, but I also want a life and I want a family, and I want a reasonable income,'" he said.
And it's not just younger doctors. Those more established in their careers are also unionizing as they see the industry changing in ways that they think undermine their profession.

In recent months, attending physicians at Salem Hospital, owned by Mass General Brigham, and a Cedars Sinai-owned anesthesiology practice filed to unionize.
About 600 doctors at Allina Health in Minnesota and Wisconsin last fall agreed to form what appears to be the largest union of private sector physicians.

https://www.axios.com/2024/04/15/doc...n-z-millennial

[Procta]

commies