Nearly half of health care workers have witnessed racism, discrimination, report shows

[Jilly_in_VA]

At a Pennsylvania hospital, a Black nurse said her emergency room colleagues routinely withheld pain medication from Black patients who sought relief from sickle cell disease.

In Montana, a phlebotomist said fellow health care workers often made "ignorant comments" about the hospital's Native American patients.

Both of these accounts surfaced in a report this week from the Commonwealth Fund and the African American Research Collaborative, based on interviews with thousands of workers who shared their experiences at hospitals and health facilities under the condition they not be identified in the groups' findings. Researchers surveyed 3,000 health care workers in what authors described as a first-of-its-kind effort to quantify whether employees see discrimination within their workplace. The five categories of health facilities included hospitals, nursing homes, outpatient care such as urgent care centers, mental health and addiction treatment centers and community or school health centers.

Nearly half of health care workers at these facilities witnessed discrimination against patients in their workplace. Younger and Black or Latino health care workers were more likely than their older or white counterparts to say they noticed discrimination against patients.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2024/02/15/health-care-racial-discrimination-report/72577444007/

I know this is true, just from my limited experience. I can cite one patient in particular, who had sickle cell disease. Just ask me.

[Elessar Zappa]

1. I know this true.

When I was a CNA in a long term care center, we had an elderly black woman (the only black person I remember ever at that care center) that was in pain all the time from bone cancer. Colleagues would constantly say she was exaggerating her symptoms and she was never given adequate pain relief. I went to the head supervisor with my concerns and so he held a meeting regarding diversity and not letting personal bias get in the way of care. It did seem to help a bit.

[Jilly_in_VA]

2. I know this is true

My story starts with one patient, who had sickle cell disease. He was in his 40s when I met him, I think maybe 42, a very slight guy who walked with one crutch because the disease had destroyed one hip socket already. We got him at our home health agency because he had a port that needed flushing periodically. He'd been passed around through about all the (white) doctors in town--we didn't have any black ones--and you could tell they didn't care about him. He had a hematologist in Knoxville, but that guy didn't much care either, apparently. Anyway, the weekend nurse got him to trust her, and eventually I did too, because we both believed him when he said he was hurting . (Also neither one of us ever said anything about his marijuana use; she and I discussed it and figured whatever helped was okay.) He would let one of us flush his port but nobody else. When I left home health and went back to the hospital, he would end up there on occasion and most of the nurses claimed he was "faking" his pain. I knew he wasn't and if I happened to be working and he knew it, he would ask for me to come and flush his port and maybe give him his Dilaudid, which I gladly did. When we got a new hematologist in town, somehow the weekend nurse from my (former) home health agency wangled a referral for him and after that things went much more smoothly for him. I think she must have had a little talk with the nurses at the hospital too. She was German and very nice but also extremely protective of her patients.