Hospital Compliance For Dummies
I write quite a bit about hospital compliance issues, so I'm familiar with some of the more dunderheaded moves an institution can make. There's the facility near Bakersfield that kept a bunch of patient records in an isolated shed near a service road that – voila! – disappeared one night. Or the wrong-sided surgeries that keep on happening with frightening regularity.
But one of the most egregious incidents in recent memory occurred at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Mich. That's where a chowderhead neo-Nazi asked that no nurses of color be allowed to touch his newborn child while it was undergoing treatment in the neonatal intensive care unit. Remarkably, his handwritten request used the term “African-American” – this wrapping of bald-faced racism within correct phraseology is a first for me.
This request apparently occurred after the father witnessed nurse Tonya Battle – a 25-year veteran of the hospital and an African-American – caring for his child, and confronted her.
“I think my mouth hit the floor. It was really disbelief,” Battle told the Detroit Free Press.
Even more dumbfoundingly, Hurley Medical Center apparently complied. According to a lawsuit Battle filed against the hospital recently, she and all other nurses of color on the NICU ward were reassigned away from caring for the newborn. This was done even after the father apparently showed off a swastika tattoo to nursing staff.
Hurley CEO Melany Gavulic denied the allegations, but that's not surprising – there is no other suitable response. However, she is eons away from the mundane events occurring on her hospital floor, and cannot verify for sure what actually happened. And given that a hospital employee is suing her employer after a quarter of a century on staff tends to confirm that this is no jackpot-seeking lark on Battle's part. She was slighted in an egregious manner, and is understandably seething about it.
And as stupid as this decision was, it could happen.
I believe it may have been tied to the ever-growing number of physical attacks against nurses and other hospital personnel by patients and family members. in California, as many as 40% of emergency room staffs claim they have been assaulted at least once in their careers.
In such a context, it makes a bitter kind of sense that the charge nurse decided that the risk of some moron going on a hate-filled rampage on hospital grounds outweighed the act of abetting his racism.
But it is completely repugnant and wrong. And it is going to be a PR disaster for Hurley likely to last for years. Try fundraising for a hospital in a city whose population is more than 50% African-American with a millstone like that hanging around your institution's neck.
What needed to be shown was a little moral fortitude on the part of the charge nurse and the rest of the nursing staff.
That means politely but firmly declining the request the first time around, and assuring the father he would be escorted off of hospital property by security staff should he ask again.
It also meant reporting the father and mother to the appropriate child protective agency. If a newborn is going to be raised in an atmosphere that condones racism and segregation right out of the womb, it is a child who is in grave danger.
Risking a potential punch from this jerk, although frightening, would have been the right thing to do.
I'm not sure such an incident would happen in California, where although there is segregation and racial animus, it is not as pronounced as it is in some pockets of the Midwest. But it's always just one misstep away, particularly if your lower level employees are misinformed and undertrained. Hospital executives will have to be vigilant to make sure what occurred at Hurley is not repeated here.
Ron Shinkman is the publisher of Payers & Providers.
