The president and CEO of an Indiana hospital provoked a negative reaction by releasing what medical professionals and health advocates described as a “blame the victim” statement about a black doctor who died of COVID-19 after alleging she was mistreated by a doctor and nurses at your medical facility because of the color of your skin.
In a press release, the president and CEO of Indiana University Hospital, Dennis M. Murphy, described Dr. Susan Moore as a “complex patient” and said that during her stay at IU Health North in Carmel, Indiana, the nursing staff who treated her for the coronavirus “may have been intimidated by an experienced patient who was using social media to express her concerns and criticize the care they were providing.”
Moore, 52, who operated her own family clinic, died in another hospital she went to the day after she was discharged from IU Health North, her 19-year-old son, Henry Muhammed, told ABC News.
Before being sent home by IU Health North, Moore recorded a hard-hitting critique of her treatment and posted the video on her Facebook page, saying, “I propose, and maintain, if I were white, I wouldn’t have to pass this one up.”
She claimed that the doctor who treated her repeatedly ignored her complaints that she was in terrible pain and wanted to send her home. This doctor, she claimed, initially said that she felt uncomfortable giving him painkillers and “made me feel like a drug addict,” she said on social media.
“That’s how black people are killed. When you send them home and they don’t know how to fight for themselves,” said Moore in the December 4 video he posted on his Facebook page from his hospital bed at IU Health North. “I had to talk to someone, maybe the media, to let people know how I’m being treated in this place.”
Muhammed told ABC News in a telephone interview on Wednesday that his mother knew her own medical history better than anyone and should have been seen as an asset to the medical team and not a sign of intimidation.
“I don’t understand how intimidating knowledge of your medical history is for a nurse or hospital staff,” said Muhammed.
He said that in addition to an IU health chaplain who came to see him, no medical center employee contacted him to apologize or express remorse.
In his statement, Murphy said he was “deeply saddened by her death and the loss her family is feeling”.
“I’m even more saddened by the experience she described in the video,” wrote Murphy. “It hurt me personally to see a patient get in touch through social media because they felt that their care was inadequate and their personal needs were not being heard.”
Murphy promised to bring together a diverse panel of health and diversity experts to conduct an external medical review of Moore’s concerns “to address any possible treatment bias”. At the same time, he showed up to defend the hospital staff who treated Moore.
“I don’t believe that we failed in the technical aspects of Dr. Moore’s care delivery,” wrote Murphy. “I am concerned, however, that we may not have shown the level of compassion and respect that we seek in understanding what is most important to patients. I am concerned that our care team did not have time due to the weight of this pandemic to listen and understand patient concerns and questions. “
Muhammed said he and his family have been talking to lawyers about their appeal options, but have not yet decided whether to take legal action against IU Health.
“I hope they do an honest and impartial investigation,” he said of the hospital. “But I can only hope for that. I don’t know if they will. “
Moore tested positive for COVID on November 29 and went to IU Health North because he had been to the hospital before and was close to his home, said Muhammed.
He said his mother was discharged from IU Health North on December 7, but stayed home for only 12 hours before he had to call an ambulance to take her to a different hospital. Moore wrote on her Facebook page that when she was admitted to Ascension St. Vincent Hospital in Carmel, her temperature rose to 103 degrees and her blood pressure dropped to 80/60. Normal blood pressure is usually 120/80.
Her health continued to deteriorate and she was put on a respirator, her son said. She died of complications from COVID-19 on December 20.
Moore’s ordeal left public health advocates and medical providers disappointed by Murphy’s statement and prompted many to express their outrage on social media.
Dr. Theresa Chapple, a black doctor and a public health advocate from Maryland, wrote on Twitter that, after reading Murphy’s statement, “I feel lit.”
“It is totally ridiculous and also something that blacks have been going through for some time in this country, and that includes black doctors,” Chapple told ABC News on Wednesday. “We have been there when we try to defend ourselves, when we try to advocate for our children. We are excused. We are seen as angry, or upset or volatile. Intimidating is something new that I hadn’t heard before reading this. “
Chapple said his work is focused on maternal mortality and trying to prevent black women from dying as a result of childbirth.
“One of the ways we can tell women what they can do to help solve this is to either advocate for themselves or have a lawyer with them. So now, take this tried and tested approach that we know helps in certain circumstances and be able to see clearly that it doesn’t help when you’re black and polite, it’s really a slap in the face, “said Chapple. “What else can you do to save your own life?”
Christie VanHorne, a New York public health advocate whose company, CVH Consulting, works to improve communication between patients and medical providers, said she was so irritated by Murphy’s response that she wrote IU Health a message complaining that the hospital was “blaming the victim” Moore for the alleged inadequate care he received.
“Honestly, it’s a shame for the medical profession to blame the victim and the nursing staff,” VanHorne told ABC News on Wednesday. “To say that the nurses were bullied by the patient, is absolutely ridiculous when she was just trying to advocate for herself.”
Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, associate black professor at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta and former president of the American Public Health Association, and three of her colleagues in the medical profession wrote an opinion piece on Moore’s case that was published in Washington Post on Saturday saying that Moore’s experience is yet another “confirmation” of the racial inequalities in the country’s health care system that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This system has a name: racism. As well-intentioned as our health system may be, it did not eradicate the false idea of a hierarchy of human valuation based on skin color and the false idea that, if such a hierarchy existed, ‘white’ people would be top “, says the opinion article that Jones wrote with Aletha Maybank, director of health actions for the American Medical Association, Uché Blackstock, founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, and Joia Crear Perry, president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative.
Blacks were also disproportionately affected and died more from coronavirus than whites. An analysis by the Brookings Institution released earlier this year showed that the COVID-19 mortality rate for blacks was 3.6 times the rate for whites.
An ABC News investigation published in April found that black people at critical points for coronavirus are twice as likely to die from the disease as their white counterparts.
“Dr. Moore knew she was being mistreated. She knew she was being mistreated because she knew what she should be getting. So it makes her voice even more powerful when she calls them, “Jones told ABC News on Wednesday.
Jones said that IU Health has to recognize that systemic racism exists in its system before it can solve the problem.
“It is not up to an individual nurse to repair or an individual doctor to repair,” said Jones. “You have to involve a lot of people, understanding that racism exists and that it is a problem for the whole system.”