https://mailchi.mp/59f0ab20e40d/the-weekly-gist-october-27-2023?e=d1e747d2d8

Around 400 primary and urgent care physicians, along with 150 nurse practitioners and physician assistants, employed by Minneapolis, MN-based Allina Health System have voted to unionize with the Service Employees International Union, forming the largest private-sector union of physicians in the country. 

Allina, which operates 12 hospitals across Minnesota and Wisconsin, already saw over 100 inpatient physicians at its Mercy Hospital vote to unionize earlier this year. While Mercy’s physicians organized against pressure to adhere to the hospital’s new length-of-stay guidelines, this larger group of clinic-based providers say they are motivated by chronic understaffing that they claim has caused burnout and threatened patient safety. Allina Health laid off 350 workers this summer after posting a nearly $200M operating loss in 2022.

The Gist: When health systems originally recruited physicians into their newly developed employed medical groups, many pitched the arrangement as more of a partnership than traditional employment.

However, now that a majority of the nation’s physicians are employed by hospitals, some physicians are rethinking their relationships with their employers. 

Only six percent of doctors were unionized in 2021, but a recent spate of unionization efforts by residents and physicians suggest that number is on the rise.

Health systems hoping to address physicians’ concerns and unionization activity should note that the motivating factors cited by organizing physicians surround working conditions, including a lack of support staff and professional autonomy, rather than personal wage demands.