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Resident doctors at Temple Health and Jefferson Health recently ratified their first union contracts. This means that more than 80% of resident doctors in the Philadelphia area are now covered by union contracts.
The residents at Penn Medicine ratified their contract in late 2024, making them the first unionized residency program in Pennsylvania. Residents at all three programs organized with the Committee of Interns and Residents, or CIR-SEIU.
According to CIR-SEIU, the highlights of the new contracts at Jefferson and Temple include salary increases of around 20%, equal pay for doctors doing similar work at different hospitals and protections against using residents to do important but nonclinical work that doesn’t require a doctor’s expertise such as drawing blood and scheduling appointments.
CIR-SEIU representatives highlighted the salary increase as a key win, saying that many residents live paycheck to paycheck. The majority of medical students graduate with student loan debt, and the average is more than $200,000, according to education researchers at the Education Data Initiative.
The salary increases will relieve some stress for doctors, which ultimately means better patient care, said Adrian Kase, a resident doctor in physical medicine and rehabilitation at Jefferson Health.
“Having physicians who are treated well, have time and money to get their car repaired, go to the doctor, see their families … those things are going to make patient care better,” she said. “They allow people the ability to free their parts of their brain from thinking about these, like, material things that we just need to get done.”
She said this matters because the first doctor who patients see when they go to a hospital is most likely a resident.