TUE AM News: Nurses at SSM Health Dean Medical Group file union petition; UW officials to seek budget funding for healthcare training, research

August 11, 2026

— Nurses at SSM Health Dean Medical Group have filed a petition to hold a union election for 380 workers across 10 clinics, SEIU Wisconsin announced, raising concerns about provider burnout, “unfair” pay and staffing issues.

The union yesterday said the move was “inspired by the momentum” generated by nurses at SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison recently voting in favor of unionization. That decision has been certified by the National Labor Relations Board.

Dani Passon, an operating room nurse at St. Mary’s, says “Dean nurses deserve the same voice” as those at the Madison hospital. Passon, who worked in one of the medical group’s clinics for five years, argues its nurses are “understaffed and undervalued” despite working hard for their patients.

“No one realizes how tough it is to work as a medical professional in an outpatient clinic, especially with our sicker patient population,” Passon said in the union’s announcement. “At my clinic, sometimes we would have around 150 calls pour in for just two or three nurses to handle, along with ordering lab tests and communicating with doctors.”

In response to the union’s claims, a spokesperson for SSM Health said the health system greatly values its nurses and “the important contributions” they make every day.

“At SSM Health we respect the rights of our employees to make a free and informed choice about whether they wish to be represented by a union,” the spokesperson wrote in an email, adding “our focus remains on supporting them and continuing to provide exceptional care for our patients and the communities we serve.”

The nurses seeking to unionize work at clinics focused on cancer treatment, urgent care, family medicine, surgery and other specialties.

Krissy Butor, a nurse in outpatient surgery who worked in St. Mary’s for 20 years, says these nurses and others at St. Mary’s, Meriter and UW Health are “united” to ensure the healthcare system prioritizes patients.

She says workers’ top priorities for unionizing include improving staffing, achieving “fair compensation” to help retain experienced nurses, as well as better training for new nurses as well.

“The administration says ‘their door is open,’ but when we approach them to advocate for our patients and ourselves, they just say ‘we hear you’ and nothing happens,” Butor said in the release.

Meanwhile, SEIU Wisconsin is accusing SSM Health leadership of standing in the way of nurses’ unionization efforts by paying a law firm to file objections to the recent St. Mary’s election with the NLRB. The union also alleges the employer is engaged in an “ongoing pressure campaign” and “scare tactics” targeting nurses, including threatening to discipline them for union activities.

See the release.

— Universities of Wisconsin officials plan to seek state funding in the 2027-29 budget to train 35,000 healthcare professionals and boost research into treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other diseases.

The university will request $90 million for the initiative to train additional healthcare professionals and $25 million to boost research. Both will be part of the broader budget request the Board of Regents is expected to consider next week.

“The Universities of Wisconsin have long served Wisconsin, and our budget proposal is focused on helping meet some of our state’s toughest challenges,” Interim President Renée Wachter said yesterday in a statement. “Today we offer a commitment to improve access to health care across the state.”

For more of the most relevant health care news, reports on groundbreaking research in Wisconsin, links to top stories and more, sign up today for the free daily Health Care Report from WisPolitics and WisBusiness.com.

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— The number of AI-related scams reported to the state Better Business Bureau over the first half of the year has more than tripled from the same period of 2025.

The group yesterday issued a warning about the increase, noting the number of reports rose from 13 between January and July of 2025 to 44 during the same period of this year, an increase of 238%. This comes as overall scam reports for Wisconsin rose by 132% over the same period.

Jim Temmer, the group’s CEO, says AI is enabling more sophisticated and convincing scams.

“Voice cloning, deepfakes and chatbots are helping scammers appear legitimate,” he said in the release.

These methods are being used to create fake endorsements, documents and business identities, while AI-generated voices are making it much easier for scammers to impersonate individual voices.

Meanwhile, scam reports that mention AI are also having a greater financial impact, according to the figures. The average financial loss for one of these scams has soared from about $778 in 2025 to $5,587 this year.

The single largest AI-related scam so far this year, which involved a fake AI trading platform, resulted in a $118,000 loss, the group says. A consumer was tricked through social media into ultimately investing $100,000 from a 401k account.

Counterfeit products and online purchases made up the largest category of scams where money was lost with about 71%, followed by phishing, investment and healthcare scams with 8.3% each. A third category covering travel, vacations and timeshares made up another 4.2%.

See the release.

— GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany has proposed a four-point plan to make home ownership more affordable, repeating his call to repeal Gov. Tony Evers’ veto that will allow annual increases in school spending for the next four centuries.

Along with repealing the veto, Tiffany said he would call a special session of the Legislature to freeze property taxes.

Other pieces of Tiffany’s plan include repealing regulations that increase costs and restrict housing supply. Yesterday’s announcement didn’t include any specifics of which regulations Tiffany would target, and his campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for more details.

Tiffany’s campaign today touted his co-sponsorship of federal legislation to bar large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, saying he would bring those same principles to Wisconsin.

The proposal comes after Dems have knocked Tiffany for missing votes on bipartisan legislation to address housing supply and affordability.

Tiffany also proposed overhauling housing assistance through the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority to expand opportunities for families seeking to buy their first home.

Nurses at SSM Health Dean clinics file for union election

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