Final week, a jury awarded $21 million to Dr. Benjamin Danielson, the Black former medical director of a clinic serving low-income kids run by Seattle Kids’s Hospital, who sued the hospital for racial discrimination towards sufferers and for making a hostile work atmosphere primarily based on race.
In his lawsuit, Danielson mentioned hospital leaders did not treatment identified practices of systemic racism, together with disproportionate use of safety towards Black sufferers, lack of translation companies, racial inequities in the way it offered well being care, and subjecting its Black and Brown staff to a double commonplace of conduct, reported the Seattle Occasions.
He additionally alleged that Dr. Jim Hendricks, a hospital administrator, used racist phrases 15 years in the past, calling him the N-word and referring to individuals of Asian descent as “Japs,” misconduct that the hospital ignored, in response to Crosscut.
Danielson, who resigned from the hospital in protest over unaddressed racism in 2020, claimed that he noticed Black sufferers handled in another way due to their race, resembling nurses calling safety after listening to a Black affected person’s raised voice.
An inside report led by the hospital’s Middle for Variety and Well being Fairness discovered that from 2008 to 2011, safety calls on Black sufferers at Seattle Kids’s have been greater than twice as seemingly as they have been for white sufferers. That disparity continued by way of 2021, per an evaluation of hospital knowledge later carried out by the Seattle Occasions.
One such episode concerned the Black father of a sick youngster being escorted away by a safety officer after requesting for workers to make use of a needleless injection gadget on his youngster — as a health care provider had ordered — as a substitute of numbing cream. This remedy left the person feeling embarrassed, demoralized and perceived as a legal, the report mentioned.
“As a black man, being escorted away from my very sick youngster by a safety officer left me powerless, embarrassed, and seen within the eyes of different households on the unit as a legal,” the daddy mentioned, in response to an inside report led by the hospital’s Middle for Variety and Well being Fairness.
When some sufferers with sickle cell illness, a blood dysfunction that may trigger extreme ache and that impacts many Black individuals, requested and acquired ache medicine, they might typically go to sleep or have slurred speech. Workers would deem these sufferers “addicts,” Anderson alleged, or attempt to limit their ache medicine.
After Danielson resigned and amid public outcry, Seattle Kids’s Hospital employed former U.S. Legal professional Common Eric Holder and his Washington, D.C.-based regulation agency, Covington & Burling, to conduct an impartial investigation.
In a abstract of the 11 findings, the agency discovered that whereas Seattle Kids’s had improved its racial and ethnic variety, “racial disparities persist in management positions, promotions and voluntary terminations.”
The investigation described a “tradition of battle avoidance and failure to handle microaggressions” and “an atmosphere that excludes and undervalues BIPOC workforce members” inside the hospital system.
Investigators additionally discovered that the hospital didn’t “adequately examine or handle” the 2009 allegation that Hendricks referred to Danielson “utilizing a racist epithet.”
Hendricks, then-president of Seattle Kids’s Analysis Institute, was compelled to resign in 2021 after Danielson’s allegations of the incident publicly surfaced. He denied having used the racial slur, and the hospital later argued that the alleged slur was an remoted incident, not proof of a sample of racial discrimination or of a hostile racial ambiance.
Danielson, who for 20 years led the Odessa Brown Kids’s Clinic at Seattle Kids’s Hospital, which serves kids of shade and low-income households, mentioned he and different Black and minority workers members felt afraid to talk out about racism for concern of retaliation by higher administration.
A distinguished pediatrician in Seattle, he had gained widespread respect amongst native residents and neighborhood leaders for combating for equitable well being entry and for exposing the well being impacts of racism throughout his tenure, in response to Crosscut. In 2018, Danielson was chosen because the Seattle Municipal League’s “Citizen of the Yr” and served on mayoral job forces.
On the time he resigned, Danielson was pushing for modifications in how Black sufferers and workers have been handled at each the present clinic and at a brand new satellite tv for pc clinic within the Othello neighborhood south of Seattle, which was being constructed to serve Black residents who had been pushed out of the town. It opened in 2022.
In his lawsuit, he alleged that when he and others expressed concern that funds raised to broaden the clinic’s companies and to construct the second website weren’t being spent on the clinic, hospital leaders retaliated towards him and launched an investigation into his management, the Occasions reported.
The hospital argued that it launched its investigation into Danielson within the spring of 2020 after receiving complaints about HIPAA violations from workers members who alleged that he had mentioned two staff’ COVID diagnoses as a part of the clinic’s contact-tracing measures. The interior investigation discovered he had violated coverage by disclosing private well being data.
“On the premise of those findings — and these findings alone — SCH and UW decided Plaintiff was not dwelling as much as the expectations of his management place as Senior Medical Director at OBCC,” the hospital’s trial transient mentioned.
The hospital demanded he endure a “360 assessment and coaching” and imposed administrative modifications to his function, Danielson mentioned. The hospital mentioned he was provided the chance to work with an govt coach, however he rejected the teaching and “flatly refused to permit his friends and subordinates to guage him.”
“In the end, the expertise helped Dr. Danielson notice that he now not might change SCH from the within,” attorneys for Danielson wrote of their trial transient. He resigned in November 2020.
Danielson “needed to present up at an establishment each day for work the place racial points have been so pervasive and so predominant that … it made it troublesome for him as a Black man to enter a white area,” mentioned Rebecca Roe, certainly one of Danielson’s attorneys, throughout closing statements.
Some workers members at Seattle Kids’s corroborated Danielson’s account of the hospital’s remedy of sufferers and workers members of shade.
In a declaration filed in courtroom in September, Dr. Corrie Anderson, who began in 2001 at Seattle Kids’s because the director of ache administration companies, mentioned he skilled racism “from my first days at SCH.”
Anderson alleged he was continuously met with resistance and opposition, alleging that a few of his colleagues “appeared to have an issue with having a Black physician as a superior,” he wrote in his declaration.
“As the top administrator I used to be instantly confronted with individuals on the service hostile to my management, and heard from others on the service that many individuals have been making damaging feedback about me,” he wrote.
In his lawsuit, Danielson was not searching for financial damages within the type of again pay or entrance pay however noneconomic damages to compensate him “for the harms he endured on account of the hostile work atmosphere and retaliation (together with) emotional misery, humiliation, private indignity, nervousness, and disillusionment, each previous and future for every kind of hurt.”
Following the big jury verdict, Danielson’s group of trial attorneys thanked their witnesses, the jurors and the neighborhood members who “stood by Dr. Danielson’s aspect towards racism.”
“That is what a Reckoning appears like,” they mentioned in a press release.
Danielson, who now practices pediatrics on the College of Washington College of Medication, mentioned he was grateful for the jury resolution and surprised on the amount of cash they awarded.
There are “a variety of different individuals who endure extra in conditions like this,” he mentioned, including, “This doesn’t repair racism. These are wounds we’ll carry the remainder of our lives, in some methods.”
Attorneys representing Seattle Kids’s countered that Danielson is a proficient, charismatic pediatrician who refused suggestions on his management and suffered from a “bruised ego.” He was, they argued, offended and annoyed to not have full management over funding choices associated to the clinic and its enlargement to the second location.
“He didn’t give up as a result of he wanted to take action so as to drive change, so as to compel a reckoning,” mentioned Portia Moore, an legal professional representing Seattle Kids’s, throughout closing statements. “He give up as a result of he realized that he would now not be capable of unilaterally dictate how OBCC, together with OBCC Othello, can be run.”
Responding to the decision, Seattle Kids’s Hospital launched this assertion:
“Because the area’s largest, impartial nonprofit kids’s hospital, our precedence is to make sure each youngster has entry to top quality, equitable care whatever the potential to pay and to help the Odessa Brown Kids’s Clinic mission to ship high quality care with dignity. Based mostly on the dearth of proof offered, we’re extraordinarily disillusioned on this extraordinary award and are evaluating our choices.”
