Providing nursing care is an intimate business. Nurses are at the bedside for births, life-threatening injuries, chronic conditions, and death. They become familiar with both a patient and their family. Helping people navigate these life changes takes compassion and empathy. There are days it is damn hard to be a nurse.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, if you’re in the hospital there will always be a nurse on-site. Budget cuts, staffing issues, increasingly complex machinery and treatments all contribute to the stress that nurses must deal as well as twelve-hour shifts, mandatory overtime, and working holidays and weekends.  Nurses are expected to keep patients safe, use resources wisely, and provide culturally competent care. The nurse is required to respect each patient as a person.

That makes it even more distressing when a hospital disrespects a nurse and her rights as in a recent lawsuit against a Michigan hospital.

The lawsuit alleges that a nurse of 25 years standing in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was told by her supervisor she would no longer be assigned to care for an infant because the baby’s daddy didn’t want African-American nurses caring for his child. The man showed the supervisor a swastika-type tattoo in relating his request. According to the lawsuit, the baby’s chart was prominently marked to indicate no African-American nurses were to be involved in this infant’s care. This was honored for a month before the hospital attorney stepped in and had the notation removed.

I don’t know what the hospital was thinking, other than to make the customer happy, but they should have told the man that they weren’t going to allow his hateful beliefs to compromise the care of his child and demean their employees. They could have offered to transfer the child to an institution willing to make those choices, if they could find one. They could have had their Ethics Board review the case and come up with an appropriate plan of care that didn’t imply that African-American nurses were any less competent, worthwhile, or caring than their white, Hispanic, or Asian counterparts. They could have done something.

Instead they bowed down to the demands that were not only hateful, but illegal. If the allegations are true, for an entire month qualified, trained nurses were told they weren’t the right color to provide care and that’s just plain wrong.

Related articles

• Nurse sues Hurley Medical Center for racial discrimination (minbcnews.com)
• Nurse Sues Hospital For Reassigning Her After Dad’s Alleged Racist Note (newsone.com)
• Nurse sues after hospital grants dad’s racial request (usatoday.com)