Letter to the Mayor from Doctors Council members

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Mayor Adams,

Mr. Mayor, we, the 2,800 strong physicians of Doctors Council, who staff the NYC Health and Hospital system and the Mayoral Agencies, call upon you as leader of New York City and guardian of its citizens well-being, to recognize and support the critical role our public health system and especially its physician workforce play in ensuring the health and wellbeing of the city. We call upon you to recognize and acknowledge the ongoing crisis in recruitment and retention of an effective physician workforce that threatens the health of the city and jeopardizes our ability to provide the care our communities need and deserve.

Come and study the waiting rooms of our clinics and emergency rooms, and our urgent care centers and see the children, men, women and families, in their need and pain, who are there hoping to receive life-saving and health-preserving care. A few moments of looking and really seeing will inform you of the importance of the mission that Doctors Council physicians embrace every day.

In your position as Mayor, we ask you to follow in the footsteps of your predecessors who recognized the importance of New York City’s public health system during ordinary times and crises like the AIDS epidemic, COVID pandemic, and the influx of new arrivals seeking refuge. We ask you to recognize that we - the physicians of Doctors Council working in Health and Hospitals and the Mayoral Agencies - brought the city through these crises - and will continue to do so in other challenges to come.

If there is one thing that we have learned from these challenges it is that the health of every citizen in New York City depends upon the health of all of its citizens. NYC H+H and the doctors of the mayoral agencies are providers to all of the citizens of New York, and critically, it is the only provider in many deserving communities of the city.

The New York City Public Health System is dependent upon a physician workforce that is mission-driven and passionately devoted to providing care to the population which we serve. Some of us have made H+H our home for decades. We are proud to work in the nation’s largest public hospital system and provide care for all New Yorkers regardless of their status and ability to pay. But the promise of our dedicated doctors is going unfulfilled because of the persistent inability to recruit and retain the physician workforce we need.

The frontline clinicians of Doctors Council live with this problem on a daily basis. We interview physicians who would love to join us in our mission and serve our communities, but we do not have the resources to remain competitive and effectively recruit them. Our colleagues have left for hospitals that are fully staffed and have adequate resources to provide care for their patients.

We have seen that in times of dire need, the city has opened up resources in a last-minute attempt to recruit and retain doctors. But these efforts are often too little, too late and have not always succeeded in preserving the services we need.

We have large staffing shortages in every hospital and several of the mayoral agencies. Health and Hospitals relies on Locum Tenens Doctors to cover the big gaps that should be filled by long term dedicated physicians. An increase in patient volume, high turnover, and physician burnout are all compounding this problem.

This affects all New Yorkers, not just the frontline doctors of Doctors Council. This crisis has direct negative impacts on our patients -- your constituents.

Listen to a patient at Jacobi who needs to wait up to a year for a routine colonoscopy or cancer screening. Or talk to one at Elmhurst whose arthritis was so bad she had to go to the ER but couldn’t get a clinic appointment for six months. Since the pandemic, we have seen a significant increase in the number of patients admitted for mental health care but simply do not have the psychiatrists to see them all. These unconscionable delays in routine and preventative care inevitably lead to bad health outcomes that cost our patients dearly.

At the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, a severe staffing crisis is occurring that will have serious consequences for families of the deceased, funeral homes, and religious communities, not to mention delays in investigating deaths necessary for NYPD and the District Attorneys’ offices to function.

We are barely staying afloat. Any new crisis like Covid could cause a collapse of the public healthcare system. Our hospitals and agencies need the resources to be prepared for the next crisis and to care for the patients we have now.

Mr. Mayor, leadership requires a clear vision of problems that confront us and the courage to face them. We call upon you to see and acknowledge the reality and seriousness of the problem confronting our healthcare system, and to listen to us, the frontline physicians of Doctors Council. We know what kind of resources and working conditions are needed to successfully recruit and retain an effective physician workforce. This goal is the key principle behind the proposals in our negotiations with the city.

We understand the problem and know what it will take to resolve the crisis of recruitment and retention. Our contract proposal is the solution to the City’s physician workforce problem.

Mr. Mayor, you do have the power to find the resources to fix this crisis. This is your time to join with us, the 2,800 plus physicians of Doctors Council, to accept the union’s solution for a healthy public health system. We are bargaining for the health of our communities; we are bargaining for the defense we need for the next COVID or AIDS or Ebola crisis. Mr. Mayor, join with us. We are your allies in ensuring the health of our city.

Thank you,

Steven Hahn, MD and Jasmeet Sandhu, MD

Representatives of the Doctors Council Members

working at H+H and Mayoral Agencies

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