Once accustomed to a status outside the usual management-labor hierarchy, many health professionals now feel as put upon as any clock-punching worker.
Dr. John Wust does not come off as a labor agitator. A longtime obstetrician-gynecologist from Louisiana with a penchant for bow ties, Dr. Wust spent the first 15 years of his career as a partner in a small business — that is, running his own practice with colleagues.
Long after he took a position at Allina Health, a large nonprofit health care system based in Minnesota, in 2009, he did not see himself as the kind of employee who might benefit from collective bargaining.
But that changed in the months leading up to March, when his group of more than 100 doctors at an Allina hospital near Minneapolis voted to unionize. Dr. Wust, who has spoken with colleagues about the potential benefits of a union, said doctors were at a loss on how to ease their unsustainable workload because they had less input at the hospital than ever before.
“The way the system is going, I didn’t see any other solution legally available to us,” Dr. Wust said.
They should be much angrier about the way things are going. NP encroachment is a very real threat to patient safety and a lot of docs just roll over for it because they legally can’t do shit about it.
I am much less worried about NP encroachment and more worried about health systems using this as a springboard to launch AI in place of physicians. At least with NPs you get someone who is capable of empathy in your most vulnerable moments.
What is NP encroachment?
Nurse practitioners have an extremely strong lobbying position and are getting laws and whatnot passed to allow them to practice without doctor supervision and to be essentially replace doctors. It’s so bad some doctor orgs have released statements about the dangers NPs pose to patient safety.
Can you share those statements because this is the single dumbest thing I have read in a while.
Thanks for clarifying. For some reason i misunderstood your comment as “RNs are looking to take work from doctors”, and knowing how much RNs are overworked and underpaid, it didn’t make much sense. My mistake. I know nothing about NPs or AAs but I did learn a little from that.
No worries man, just make sure you’re seen by a doc when you go to the doctors office for your safety!
