Leslie Poston and Sara Goodkind: It’s time for UPMC to do more than fly banners for our health care heroes

Around the country and across industries, workers are standing up to demand fair pay and treatment. The worker shortage — called “The Great Resignation” — is particularly acute in health care, where the staffing crisis has left many concerned for worker and patient safety.

Essential care workers are being pushed past the brink — staggering under the weight of intense stress, overwork and grief.

But everyone who lives in Pittsburgh understands that hospital workers’ hardships didn’t start with the pandemic. Workers like me, Leslie Poston, brought attention to these hardships when, in 2013, I led a public demonstration of full-time employees forced to use food banks to feed our families. In 2018, this time after having been diagnosed with breast cancer a few years earlier, I called attention to the health inequities faced by Black women in our region and the strong correlation between our poor health outcomes, low wages and medical debt.

As a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, I, Dr. Sara Goodkind, have been working with hospital workers like Leslie over many years to understand precisely what contributes to housing insecurity, hunger, skipped medical treatment and even shortened life expectancy. While covid-19 has certainly played a role, our finding is that the strongest predictor of ill health, distress and burnout continues to be financial insecurity. Expert analysis shows that having sufficient pay is thus one of the most important social determinants of health.

On the eve of UPMC workers’ fifth strike in as many years, both of us want to acknowledge the heroism of front-line health care workers. For months it’s these hidden heroes who have shouldered the responsibility to care for the community. In 2020, UPMC recorded record profits. Now it’s time to act on essential workers’ solutions: a minimum wage of $20/hour, the elimination of medical debt and the right to form a union without interference. These are our most powerful tools for reducing hardships, for closing troubling and growing disparities in health and income, and for making sure that the power and wealth of our largest landowner, provider and public charity is harnessed not only to heal the patients who come through the doors but to promote the well-being of the hospital workers we all depend upon.

Leslie Poston is an administrative assistant at UPMC Presbyterian. Sara Goodkind is an associate professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work.