Resident Unions Are Growing in Popularity in Otolaryngology

by Renée Bacher •

When Gaelen Stanford-Moore, MD, MPhil, was an otolaryngology resident at the University of California, San Francisco, hospital administrators decided to make a change that would have had residents paying for overnight parking. Patients with airway emergencies, however, might suffer indirectly from this, and so resident union representatives, including Dr. Stanford-Moore, made hospital administrators aware.

“By discussing how crucial it was for residents to have parking provided while on call overnight in order to drive in from home and not look for cheaper parking farther from the hospital, we could take better care of patients with life-threatening emergencies,” she said. “This provided the hospital representatives with new context for what our jobs actually entailed.”

Currently a facial plastic and reconstructive surgery fellow at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Dr. Stanford-Moore said that the need for safe, easy, and free parking for on-call residents became much more apparent to the hospital when residents in multiple fields shared their experiences. “Ultimately, the hospital chose to continue providing free parking to on-call trainees overnight,” she said.

Thousands of medical residents nationwide have unionized in recent years or are currently voting to do so. Last spring at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, a large majority of residents and fellows filed to unionize with the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR), a union that represents resident physicians nationwide. According to National Public Radio, insiders said that the existing House Staff Governing Council was extremely limited in what they could accomplish on behalf of residents and fellows and that concerns were often brushed aside. Similar efforts have occurred since the pandemic at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Montefiore Hospital in New York City, and Mass General Brigham in Boston. According to WBUR radio in Boston, Mass General Brigham has one of the largest residency programs in the country, and unionization was supported by 75% of those voting, despite a campaign of emails and video messages from hospital leaders urging them to vote no.

What does this mean for the future? Sunyata Altenor, communications director for the CIR, the country’s largest house staff union, was quoted in an article in the AAMC News: “Every year, we had one or two new organizing campaigns, but once COVID hit, that number pretty much tripled. It was a massive wave, and we anticipate that it will continue to grow” (www.bit.ly/ResidentUnions).