Why the clock is ticking for resident unions | Philly Health Insider
Plus, two local health organizations struggle for survival
This week, we take you inside an unprecedented push by Philly medical residents to unionize before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20. Plus, we have details on an incoming surge in medical malpractice cases, and two local organizations’ fights to stay solvent.
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— Aubrey Whelan and Alison McCook, Inquirer health reporters, @aubreyjwhelan.
Philly lived up to its reputation as a union town last week, when 3,300 resident physicians and fellows from four major area health systems announced their plans to unionize, seeking strength in numbers to negotiate for better working conditions.
National union leaders call the scale of the local interest unprecedented: “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said A. Taylor Walker, the president of the Committee of Residents and Interns, the SEIU-affiliated union organizing Philly’s residents.
Residents at CHOP, Temple, Jefferson, Einstein (owned by Jefferson), and Delaware’s ChristianaCare will all vote on whether to unionize in the coming weeks. They’re part of a wave of doctors unionizing in the region, from residents at Penn and Rutgers to attendings at ChristianaCare.
We’ll keep you posted on developments in the months ahead. The clock is ticking for Philly’s newest unionizing residents.
CIR officials fear that the incoming Trump administration will make it much harder for graduate students to unionize, based on policies proposed in his first term. In short: Donald Trump’s labor officials didn’t think graduate students counted as employees; President Joe Biden’s did, and recognized more than 50 graduate student unions in the last four years.
The residents are hoping to hold a union vote and certify their unions with the feds before Inauguration Day in January. Can they do it? Stay tuned to this newsletter for future updates and read Aubrey’s story for a close look at the union drive.
The latest news to pay attention to
The number of medical malpractice cases filed this year in Philadelphia is expected to surge, after a rule change that allowed cased to be filed here even if the incident occurred in a different county. But by how much? Read Harold Brubaker’s story to find out.
Public Health Management Corp. is slashing several long-running programs to save money. Harold has more on the tough choices that PHMC, one of the area’s largest health and human services nonprofits, had to make.
Philadelphia’s largest LGBTQ health agency, the Mazzoni Center, says it’s facing bankruptcy after a “rogue employee” took out high-interest debt to make payroll. Reporter Abraham Gutman has the scoop on the agency’s fight in federal court to get out of repaying the roughly million dollars it owes.
Guess what? The soda tax works. But how, and by how much? For answers, read Aubrey’s story, which has the facts and figures from a new study in The Lancet.
The big number: 21.
That’s the number of gun safes distributed to Philly residents in half an hour at Penn’s Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, where staff held a recent event to promote gun safety. More residents wanted them, as demand exceeded the supply of safes on hand. Those who missed out signed up to get one mailed to them.
Like other health systems in the area, Penn has long given out gun locks — cables that wind around the trigger of a gun to prevent it from being loaded or fired.
Gunshot wounds are the leading cause of death for children.
Between January and September, Phoenixville Hospital (owned by Tower Health) was cited for failing to document less restrictive means of subduing patients before using physical restraints. Reporter Sarah Gantz has details on the four visits inspectors made to the facility to investigate potential safety problems.
A lot of health-care experts have strong opinions about the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services — including local vaccine expert Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Offit dealt with RFK Jr. when the former presidential candidate called Offit to ask whether thimerosal, a compound used as a preservative in vaccines (and removed since 2001), caused autism. (Offit reassured Kennedy that vaccines are safe.)
Read on for exclusive details from Offit’s take on what it could mean to have an anti-vaccine activist running the nation’s health agency — and why he calls Kennedy a “dangerous man.”
AtlantiCare Health System has an ambitious growth plan (double its revenue to $2 billion over six years), and it’s making moves to get there.
The health-care organization has appointed Joseph V. Lombardi as its next chief physician executive, effective 2025. Lombardi comes to AtlantiCare from Cooper University Hospital, where he served as chief of vascular and endovascular surgery and director of aortic surgery.
Blood and urine samples from thousands of people, collected over more than 30 years, are a gold mine for researchers.
A Penn professor just got $11 million from the National Institutes of Health to use this patient sample (part of CARDIA, a long-term study about the risks of coronary artery disease that began in the 1980s) to study the link between chemical exposures and dementia.
Aimin Chen, a senior environmental epidemiologist at Penn, will run those samples through a mass spectrometer to see which environmental chemicals — pesticides, metals, and chemicals found in plastics and furniture — appear more frequently in people who develop Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia.
Check out Alison’s story for more information on this project, including how the researchers are even planning to study the role of unknown chemicals in future brain health.
📮Which chemical exposures do you suspect increase risk of dementia? For a chance to be featured in this newsletter, email us back.
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