What lawsuit do you think the hospital avoided by banning black nurses from caring for this child?
It has been my experience that white racists who display tattoes as a means of explanation, do not make particularly sound judgments on many occasions. Based on my experiences encountering skinheads, Neo-Nazis, KKK members etc., it would not be inconceivable for someone of that persuasion to try to remove a premature infant from a NICU if they were convinced it was the best decision regardless of what the hospital staff tried to do. It has also been my experience that such individuals tend to own firearms (please don’t turn this into a firearms or sterotyping debate). Plenty of hospitals don’t require patients relatives or visitors to walk through metal detectors. I am thinking this guy set off plenty of warning signals in someone’s opionion and they felt keeping the premature infant in the NICU trumped other issues. They choose the lesser of many evils.
The one that happens when the father removes the child from NICU before it is reasonably safe to do so and the child dies. Trust me there is a lawyer somewhere that would take that case and argue that the hospital was somehow liable. Juries in the United States tend to find dead babies more pitiable than adults who have been discriminated against.
I’ll be sure and bounce that one off my fellow attorneys next time we’re in need of a good laugh (or cry, as we are more often tempted to do over the crazy things people believe about how the law works).
I’ve been a medical malpractice lawyer for over 20 years. I know you’ll be relieved to hear that your fears for the poor, vulnerable hospital are groundless.
That would go a long way towards solving the problem. But this sort of crap has come up elsewhere, as in a Philadelphia case where a man demanded his pregnant wife not be seen by black caregivers (the hospital CEO later wound up apologizing and disciplinary action was reportedly taken against the idiot(s) who thought giving in to such a demand was reasonable.
When it happened in Seattle, the result was a federal lawsuit.
I can see this. If the guy was scary–really scary–I can see deciding that placating him was more important than principle, especially post-Sandy Hook. Shooting up a NICU is kind of the final frontier in “absolutely appalling gun violence”, and it feels a lot less implausible now than it did six months ago. In a situation like that, if my instincts were screaming at me that there was something seriously off about someone (and flashing a swastika is pretty seriously off) I can see thinking more in terms of safety than principle, and fuck any lawsuits in either direction.
Do we know for sure that the hospital made no attempts to reason with this guy? The story gives the beginning (Nazi guy is a jerk) and the end (hospital rolls over), but I wonder what happened in between. It’s easy to infer from the story that that’s all there was to it, but so often in these news events, it later turns out that there were overlooked details that were relevant.
Manda JO
I agree with this…I can see how a guy with that type of demeanor, rolling up his sleeve to show his swastika could feel to the medical staff a threat, and could suddenly go off, and do God knows what, maybe angrily start throwing stuff, turning over the babies incubators, and worse case pull out a gun. Presented with the immediate safety of the nicu infants, I think that took priority over an employee being offended by racial discrimination.
Love it!
When I was with Legal Aid, I had a client one summer who I could see was covered with Nazi and Aryan tattoos. He really had been wronged by a car dealership. To my amazement he actually seemed like a nice guy, but I was careful not to discuss politics or race relations with him.
ZPG Zealot: taking alphaboi’s comment under consideration, in your experience, how do skinheads/neo-Nazis/etc. deal with or otherwise relate to Indians?
ETA: I’m pretty much with phouka on this, maybe backed up by some burly Sheriff’s Deputies ready to escort racist-Dad off hospital grounds if necessary.
Sorry for being cranky.
You know, I can see wanting to avoid an on-the-spot (the spot being the NICU presumably) confrontation with the crazy father. I’ve always been the person in my office called upon to deal with the loonies, and I’ve often found that the way to deal with crazies is to go with their program to the extent possible, or at least not argue with them.
But wat the hospital did (and of course we only have what’s int he article to judge) is a very big deal. Not only did they agree to overtly discriminate agaisnt their own employees, they agreed to and did rearrange their staffing along racial lines. NICU nurses are highly skilled professionals, hospitals are lean and mean these days, so just the staffing issue would be at best wildly inconvenient and at worst a danger to this kid and others in the unit. And what happens if this baby’s alarm goes off when the only white nurse on the unit is in the middle of a procedure with another child? Is the black nurse on duty supposed to ignore the Nazi’s child’s dropping oxygen saturations or arrhythmia?
She can’t, and if she did it would be a violation of the standard of good nursing care. So she’s not just been discriminated against but put in an untenable situation.
Hospitals have security and administration to deal with patient complaints and bad behavior. I’m quite sure that if the guy had demanded that his baby receive kool-ade instead of IV fluid the request would have been denied no matter how scared folks were by his tattoo. So I still don’t understand why the nurse manager or whoever made the decision went with this particular program.
Your right of course rhat discrimination is a big deal but possible violence or mayhem in a nicu even bigger deal
Here’s my take:
- The baby was in NICU (neonatal intensive care). The father was not in NICU.
- The father went to the hospital administration (NOT the NICU) and made a demand.
- His demand should have been politely refused.
- If the father demanded to remove the baby from NICU, the police should have been called.
- If the father tried to forcibly remove the baby from NICU, he would be guilty of child abuse.
I do understand not wanting to provoke a loony. But the hospital was unfair and broke the law.
I couldn’t tell from the article where the demand and tat display took place. It says he approached hospital administration but it also says “the nurse in charge” which could mean the nurse manager on the unit.
But the facts alleged seem to be that the black nurse was reassigned from taking care of the baby, a sign was posted that black people should not care for the baby, and that this arrangement was continued for however long the baby was on the unit.
So it was not a middle-of-the-night on the NICU crisis averted by humoring the crazy man but a deliberate, discriminatory rearrangement of staffing over a period of time.
Some more details have been released in articles today. It seems that it was both.
From http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/16/us/michigan-hospital-discrimination/index.html
While I haven’t found anything that definitively states this, it looks like the lawsuit is based on the staffing changes that were made after the initial incident took place, rather than what was done to “humor the crazy man” at the moment of his request.
The hospital should have reassigned a different nurse to the child and given a reason for it so that no one else (including the nurse who had been reassigned) would have known what the reason was. That way they would have satisfied the idiot racist father’s demands (since they can’t exactly say “Go take your child elsewhere if you don’t like it”) and risk the baby’s health, and the nurse would not feel discriminated against.
The nurse did not FEEL discriminated against. She WAS discriminated against.
Yes. Yes, they are, and my mom spent nearly 20 years as a nursing teacher, so it’s kind of double whammy. (Her response to a lawyer threatening to sue her school because they wouldn’t re-admit a twice flunked out student, saying that everyone has the right to make mistakes: "You look like you’re in your early forties. You’re carrying about thirty pounds more than you should. You smoke, and you’re in a stressful occupation. So, when you have a heart attack, you’ll be okay with your nurse making a mistake in your treatment?)
The thing is, this isn’t the first time a hospital has ever had to deal with a creepy/scary/sketchy/hostile person. They have procedures and protocols in place for when they think a patient or family member might go off on them. There are panic buttons, security phones, code phrases, and signals that bring security pronto, and security is used to doing everything from pointedly occupying space nearby to putting restraints on a raving naked person in a drug-induced psychotic break.
But the thing is in this case it is a delicate balance between a customer with a child who doing anything to disrupt its process of caregiving could be potentially a health risk, and between discriminating against an employee. That is why they should have reassigned the nurse without giving any indication as to why, so she never would know.
Doesn’t the hospital have a duty of care to its employees? Isn’t assigning an African American nurse to a Neo Nazi who has already expressed hostility towards people of that race a potential risk to that nurse?