Docs catch union fever | Philly Health Insider

It’s hot outside, and temperatures are rising with unionization fever.

On this Juneteenth, we highlight a precedent-setting union vote by attending physicians working for Delaware’s largest health system, a new tool to explore racial disparities in pharmacy access, and an update on a CAR-T safety scare.

Also, longtime health leaders are making career moves. Let’s get into it!

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— Abraham Gutman and Aubrey Whelan, Inquirer health reporters, @abrahamgutman and @aubreywhelan.

A year after residents at Penn Medicine’s Philadelphia hospitals formed the region’s largest new union in half a century, more than 400 attending physicians in Delaware’s ChristianaCare will start voting Thursday on whether to form a union of their own.

If approved, the union will be the first of its kind in the region for hospital physicians who have completed their training.

Physician burnout is among the grievances driving the unionization effort, including frustration over growing administrative burdens.

“It all boils down to how much time I can spare with a patient,” said Gennadiy Ryklin, a ChristianaCare hospitalist, who is among the union drive organizers. “Now I feel that my job is about checking checkboxes.”

The idea of joining a union was once inconceivable to many physicians, who used to work in practices that they co-owned. But times have changed. In the 1980s, three out of every four physicians was self-employed. By 2022, as many doctors had become employees of hospitals, health systems, and other corporate entities.

So what’s next? ChristianaCare physicians will vote over the next week on whether they want to be represented by Doctors Council, an affiliate of SEIU. The physician organizers and the health system are each campaigning through websites, meetings, videos, and e-mails.

We will update you on the results!

✍️ We want to hear your thoughts: if ChristianaCare physicians’ unionize, could other area health-care systems and hospitals be next?

Write back for a chance to be featured in next Wednesday’s newsletter.

This week’s number: 0.087

That’s the number of pharmacies per 1,000 residents in 19150 ZIP code encompassing the Cederbrook and Stenton neighborhoods in northwest Philadelphia, where 91% of residents are Black.

Compare that to 0.31 in 19147 — the Queen Village, Bella Vista area — where 8% of residents are Black, and 70% are white.

The numbers come from a new interactive tool developed by the Associated Press, which shows the number of pharmacies per 1,000 people in ZIP codes throughout the U.S. and the area’s population by race.

Let us know what patterns you notice, or what this tool shows about access to pharmacies in your community.

Jefferson Abington Hospital was cited twice for safety violations in the first quarter of 2024. Both incidents involved behavioral health patients. On Feb. 16, inspectors cited the Montco hospital for failing to prevent a high-risk patient from falling by not monitoring the patient closely enough. A month later, the inspectors cited the hospital for a strangulation risk in two behavioral health patients’ rooms because of an 8-foot-long power cord that was part of a virtual monitoring system.

Learn more about the two incidents.

Planned Parenthood is closing one of its two clinics in Bucks County, citing “the changing health-care environment.” Aubrey spoke with Signe Espinoza, the head of Planned Parenthood’s activist arm in Pennsylvania, about efforts underway to make abortion more accessible here.

”Abortion is legal in Pennsylvania, but it sure as hell is not accessible,” Espinoza said.

An end of an era: The longest serving health-system executive in the Philadelphia region is retiring.

Michael Laign had served as the CEO of Redeemer Health since 1993. But starting July 15, the nonprofit Catholic health system will have a new leader. Greg Wozniak, the CEO of St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne from 1999 to 2015, will take over as the system’s chief executive officer.

In another change of a long-held leadership role: Della Payne will serve as Main Line Health’s next general counsel effective September 1. Payne, currently a deputy general counsel, will succeed Brian Corbett, who will retire Nov. 1 after more than two decades in the role.

The risk of secondary cancer from CAR-T is lower than previously feared, according to an FDA official who spoke in King of Prussia last week.

The agency has been studying a handful of cases where patients developed lymphoma after CAR-T therapy, a treatment pioneered at Penn and hailed as a cure for some types of blood cancers. The fear was that the treatment is causing new cancers, and it was so concerning that the FDA ordered companies to put a “black box” warning on the products that were under review.

But very few were the result of the treatment. That’s what Peter Marks, who heads the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, told the crowd at the 2024 @Philly Cell And Gene Therapy Annual Conference.

“Luckily, the majority of these, it looks like are just secondary T cell malignancies that are occurring in people who have T cell malignancies. That’s a known phenomenon,” Marks said.

Other concerns around the treatment that we have previously highlighted will likely be harder to address, such as racial disparities in who has access.

That’s it for us this week. We are getting into summer mode, and that usually means that our inboxes slow down a bit. So don’t be shy and reach out — let us know what we should be looking into the summer. What’s the big health-care talker in your world?

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