Physicians at ChristianaCare, Delaware's largest health system, will vote on whether to form a union in a weeklong election, June 20 to June 27.Dozens of doctors working at ChristianaCare dialed into a Zoom call last week to learn more about union organizing from their peers in Minnesota and Oregon.Ahead of the weeklong voting period — which will start Thursday — some of the roughly 70 ChristianaCare doctors on the Zoom call still had questions.
“What did you have to give up to get more teams, better patient census limits, more money?” one attendee asked, according to a recording of the event obtained by The Inquirer. “It seems too good to be true.”, said David Schwartz, who specializes in care for hospitalized patients at the West Coast health system. He explained that theirAmerican physicians traditionally were not part of organized labor. Three out of every four physicians in the U.S.
Now, ChristianaCare’s more than 400 attending physicians are poised to extend the trend to physicians who are no longer in training. If the attending physicians unionize, they would also be the first ChristianaCare employees to do so in the health system’s 136-year history.
Michael Noonan, a ChristianaCare physician who provides end-of-life care, completed his residency training at Boston Medical Center, where trainees have been part of a union represented byOne concern: The union will lead to a one-size-fits-all contract. Noonan has been telling his peers that a union contract can accommodate each department’s needs while securing sweeping protections for working doctors.