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- Nearly 10,000 attending doctors in the UC system will announce a unionization effort.
- UC Doctors United seeks improved working conditions, patient safety, and protections for physicians.
- SEIU California, California Nurses Association and UAW Local 4811 endorsed the campaign.
Nearly 10,000 attending doctors in the University of California system have announced their effort to unionize at a Thursday news conference outside the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
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The campaign, UC Doctors United, is a joint effort between doctors in the UC system and Service Employees International Union Doctors United, a union that currently comprises 45,000 doctors and 1.2 million healthcare workers nationwide.
UC Doctors United said in an announcement Monday it is organizing for improved working conditions, stronger patient care and safety, more comprehensive medical education and better protections for academic freedom and the peer review system.
“Attending physicians across the country have been uniting together to take back their profession and the expert care patients need and deserve,” Doctors Council SEIU President Dr. Frances Quee said in a statement. “We’re overworked. We’re burnt out. We’re frustrated that decisions made about our work are based on the bottom line, not patient outcomes.”
UC Health was not immediately able to provide comment.
Erica Brode, a doctor of family medicine at UC San Francisco, said she has worked at UCSF’s Department of Family and Community Medicine for 19 years. For the majority of that time, Brode said she felt confident in UCSF’s values of “patient-centered care and evidence-based medicine.” Recently, she said, that has changed.
“I really felt a distinct shift focused more on profits and expansion of UCSF over patient care and the people that work here,” Brode said. “That’s part of why I decided to join this (unionization) movement.”
According to Brode, the hospital has shifted from value-based metrics to profit-based metrics as a means to evaluate primary care. Doctors are also asked to work more, Brode said, often arriving before clinical staff or working through lunch breaks to meet expectations.
“I’ve seen quite a bit of turnover,” Brode said. “I think that’s why I feel like it’s critical to stand up at this moment. … The goal is to have a longitudinal, lifelong relationship with your patient panel, and if our providers are being overworked and deprioritized to the point that they leave, then that harms patients as well.”
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Brode said that she has thought about searching for another job, but considers the more than 700 patients she has treated at UCSF to be “family members.” Instead, she said, she decided to stay at UCSF and fight for UC Doctors United.
UC Doctors United marks the largest unionization effort of attending doctors nationally. SEIU California endorsed the campaign alongside the California Nurses Association and United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represent UC nurses and early career researchers, respectively.
The formation of UC Doctors United comes in the wake of UC resident physicians and fellows’ tentative contract agreement with UC Health. Represented by SEIU and the Council for Interns and Residents, the group negotiated a statewide deal that increases salaries by 18%, preserves fertility benefits, improves access to radiation exposure equipment, provides immigrant protections for patients and secures improvements to emergency room capacity.
“We are very happy with what we were able to negotiate for our futures, including the wage increases, better access to properly fitting lead, and enshrining our fertility benefits in this contract,” said UCLA emergency medicine resident Diana Dayal in a statement. “However, we’re also really proud that we were able to win language for our patients, especially for the immigrant communities we serve so that they can receive care with less fear, and for all our patients who have had to contend with issues related to emergency room capacity.”
The tentative agreement followed a year of negotiations during which UC residents and fellows participated in a series of demonstrations. These actions culminated in June with a series of 18 “unity breaks” at a number of UC health campuses.
The UC resident physicians and fellows’ bargaining team will present the contract to the union’s full membership for a ratification vote in the coming weeks. If more than half the members vote in favor of the contract, it will then take effect.
“Doctors deserve a voice at every stage of their career,” said CIR/SEIU President Trina Van in a statement. “From interns, residents, and fellows to attending doctors, University of California doctors are getting spread thin from the increasingly corporatized structure that overloads doctors and limits patient time. Interns and residents have made incredible gains by standing together at their workplace.”
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