Dear Doctors Council Member,

On Tuesday, we delivered a petition (see below) which over 1100 of you signed to H+H President and CEO Dr. Mitch Katz. We asked for a town hall meeting to discuss our need for a fair contract to solve a problem he and we share – recruiting and retaining doctors to provide our patients and communities the care they deserve. Dr. Katz has graciously agreed.

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We will be holding this town hall virtually at 6:30 PM on Monday, July 22 (Reach out to your Contract Organizer for zoom info). We highly encourage you to attend: this is your chance to engage in dialogue with your CEO over your contract.

The town hall will be open for all members to attend and to watch. Your attendance is important to demonstrate that our members are active and engaged in their contract campaign.

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Letter to Mitchell Katz, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of NYC Health + Hospitals

Dear Dr. Katz,

We are writing to you as H+H doctors who are proud to be working in the nation’s largest public hospital system, to be living the H+H mission every day, upholding the highest possible clinical standards and standing against corporate profiteering by caring for all New Yorkers regardless of their ability to pay.

We are deeply concerned about the resilience of the H+H system since it is facing a worsening physician recruitment and retention crisis that is threatening its survival. We have remained invested in our communities through difficult times, most recently through the Covid Pandemic with not much help from the City administration.

The communities we serve face long standing health inequities, many of which are societal, but also have been exacerbated by decades of under-investment in our public healthcare infrastructure. This includes chronic understaffing of doctors and other healthcare workers, which hurts the quality and timeliness of care our patients need and deserve.

We ourselves are deeply affected by this retention and recruitment crisis. When there are gaps in our units, we have to go above and beyond our duties. When our patients can’t access care because of gaps elsewhere, we fight and advocate for them. But this is inappropriate, and it takes a toll on us. Doctors are retiring early or quitting due to chronic understaffing and deteriorating working conditions. Private sector recruiters are aggressively poaching our coworkers with far more competitive offers. All of this has worsened since 2020. Burnout and even suicide rates have increased among our colleagues.

Filling empty physician positions with locum tenens who are paid much higher wages than regular staff is corrosive to both staff morale and patient safety and quality of care.These concerns are also shared by residents working in our system, provoking the first NYC doctor strike in over 30 years at Elmhurst Hospital last year. As you are well aware, we are currently in the process of bargaining for our new contract.

Our goal is to negotiate a fair contract that will allow us to recruit and retain high quality doctors to ensure that we can provide high quality care to our patients and that our own work conditions are reasonable. Unfortunately, this understaffing crisis is not being addressed by NYC or the affiliates, and it urgently needs your attention.

We understand you are not directly involved in bargaining and cannot specifically negotiate with us, however given your role in the system and ability to speak with those with this authority, and given your responsibility to understand what your workers and patients experience, we request that you meet with us in a Zoom town hall meeting within the next 2 weeks, open to our members, in order to discuss the understaffing crisis and how our contract negotiations have stalled. We look forward to receiving your response.

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