80-hour weeks and roaches near your cot? More medical residents unionize
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Since the pandemic, a lot more doctors in training want to unionize. They say they want better working conditions and wages that cover their cost of living. From member station WHYY in Philadelphia, Alan Yu has more on one of the newest campaigns.
ALAN YU, BYLINE: Doctor Leah Rethy was pregnant during the first year of her internal medicine residency at the University of Pennsylvania Health System. She gave birth during her second year.
LEAH RETHY: I worked through my 40th week of pregnancy, really trying to maximize the amount of time I had with my baby after he was born.
YU: Now she's back at work and needs child care, a lot of child care. Residents often work long and irregular hours, sometimes as much as 80 hours a week. She says there is childcare affiliated with her workplace, but the waitlist is impossible. And finding her own childcare or a nanny is prohibitively expensive.
RETHY: The cost of day care is - in a month is about half of my salary in total. And the cost of a nanny is essentially the entirety of my salary.
YU: She says this is not an unusual problem. Residency comes on the heels of at least eight years of schooling, so it overlaps with childbearing years for a lot of people.
RETHY: I know a lot of people who've delayed having children, and I also have heard a number of stories of people delaying having children and then ultimately having real challenges getting pregnant because of being older and various factors.
YU: She says unionizing is the best way to ask for better working conditions and higher pay. She says that would ultimately lead to better patient care. Penn Medicine says in a prepared statement in part that they are proud of how they improve resident life and increased salaries to make wages competitive. They also say residents should work directly with administrators through an existing advisory council. Dr. Madison Sharp is an obstetrician and gynecologist in the third year of her residency.
MADISON SHARP: I was the president of this council last year, and I can tell you firsthand that the House Staff Governing Council is extremely limited in what we could accomplish. And it was incredibly frustrating to advocate for residents and fellows and not be heard or have our concerns brushed aside or dismissed.
YU: The vast majority of residents and fellows filed a petition to unionize with the Committee of Interns and Residents. That union represents resident physicians across the country. Before 2020, there was roughly one union campaign a year. In 2022, there were eight. Communications director Sunyata Altenor says residents who want to unionize know the program is supposed to be hard work with long hours, but they want to be treated fairly for the work they put in at a workplace they cannot just choose to leave because it's part of their training.
SUNYATA ALTENOR: It's easy to exploit physicians during this time in their career. They're only going to be there for a few years. It's sort of expected that you go through this hard hazing culture and then you come out at the other end an attending physician.
YU: The campaign in Philadelphia comes as residents at other hospitals around the country are unionizing as well. Recently, residents at Montefiore Hospital in New York won a union election, and residents at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Mass General Brigham in Boston announced they want to unionize as well. For NPR News, I'm Alan Yu in Philadelphia.
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