The president and CEO of an Indiana hospital has called for backlash for the release of what medical professionals and health care advocates described as a “ blame the victim ” statement about a black doctor who died of COVID-19 after claiming she was abused by a doctor and nurses at his medical facility because of the color of her skin.
In a press release, Indiana University Hospital president and CEO Dennis M. Murphy described Dr. Susan Moore as a “ complex patient ” and said nursing staff treated her during her stay at the IU Health North facility in Carmel, Indiana for coronavirus “possibly intimidated by a knowledgeable patient who used social media to voice her concerns and criticize the care they provided.”
Moore, 52, who ran her own GP practice, died in another hospital she went to a day after she was discharged from IU Health North, her 19-year-old son, Henry Muhammed, told ABC News.
Before she was sent home from IU Health North, Moore recorded a scathing review of her treatment and posted the video to her Facebook page, saying, “I put forward, and I claim that if I was white, I would be there. didn’t have to go through that. “
She claimed that the doctor who treated her repeatedly ignored her complaints that she was in excruciating pain and wanted to send her home. That doctor, she claimed, initially told her that he was uncomfortable giving painkillers and “that I felt like a drug addict,” she said on social media.
“This is how black people are killed. If you send them home and they don’t know how to fight for themselves,” Moore said in the December 4 video she posted to her Facebook page from her 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 else and should have been seen as an asset to the medical team and not a sign of harassment.
“I don’t understand how knowing your medical history is intimidating to a nurse or hospital staff,” said Muhammed.
He said that other than a chaplain from the IU Health system, not a single medical center official contacted him to apologize or express regret.
In his statement, Murphy said he is “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,” Murphy wrote. “It personally hurt me to see a patient contacted via social media because they felt their care was inadequate and their personal needs were not being listened to.”
Murphy pledged to assemble a diverse panel of healthcare and diversity experts to conduct an external medical review of Moore’s concerns “to address potential treatment bias.” At the same time, he seemed to be defending the hospital staff that Moore was treating.
“I do not believe we have failed the technical aspects of the delivery of Dr. Moore’s care,” Murphy wrote. “I am concerned, however, that we may not have shown the level of compassion and respect we strive to understand what matters most to patients. I am concerned that our healthcare team did not have the time due to the burden of this pandemic for the concerns and hear and understand questions from the patient. “
Muhammed said he and his family have spoken to attorneys about their remedies but have not yet decided whether to take legal action against IU Health.
“I hope they do a fair and unbiased 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 Nov. 29 and went to IU Health North because she had been hospitalized before and it was close to her home, Muhammed said.
He said his mother was released from IU Health North on December 7, but was home for only 12 hours before he had to call an ambulance to take her to another hospital. Moore wrote on her Facebook page that when she was admitted to Ascension St. Vincent Hospital in Carmel, her temperature had risen to 103 degrees and her blood pressure dropped to 80/60. Normal blood pressure is generally 120/80.
Her health continued to deteriorate and she was placed on a ventilator, her son said. She died of complications from COVID-19 on December 20.
Moore’s ordeal has disappointed public health advocates and medical providers with Murphy’s statement, prompting many of them to voice their outrage on social media.
Dr. Theresa Chapple, a black physician and public health advocate from Maryland, wrote on Twitter that after reading Murphy’s statement, “I feel gaseous.”
“It’s so utterly ridiculous and also something that black people have been going through for quite some time in this country, and that includes black doctors,” Chapple told ABC News on Wednesday. “We’ve been through this when we try to advocate for ourselves, when we try to advocate for our kids. We get fired. We are seen as angry, or upset or fleeting. Harassment is a new thing I hadn’t heard of before reading this . ‘
Chapple said her work focuses on maternal mortality and tries to prevent black women from dying as a result of childbirth.
“One of the ways we tell women they can do that to deal with that is by advocating for themselves or having a lawyer with them there. So now to take this tried and true approach that we know is in certain circumstances and being able to see clearly that it doesn’t help if you’re black and educated, it’s really a slap in the face, ”said Chapple. “What else can you do to save your own life?”
Christie VanHorne, a public health advocate from New York whose company, CVH Consulting, works to improve communication between patients and medical providers, said she was so upset with Murphy’s response that she wrote IU Health a post complaining that the hospital ‘blamed the victim’. Moore for the alleged inadequate care she received.
“It’s frankly a shame on the medical profession that they would blame the victim and the nursing team,” VanHorne told ABC News Wednesday. “To say the nurses were intimidated by the patient, it’s absolutely ridiculous that she was just trying to advocate for herself.”
Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, a black assistant associate professor at 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 op-ed on Moore’s case that was published in the Washington DC Post on Saturday that Moore’s experience is more “confirmation” of racial inequalities in the national health care system that surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That system has a name: racism. As well as our healthcare system is meant to be, it has not eradicated the false idea of a hierarchy of human appreciation based on skin color and the false idea that if there were such a hierarchy, ‘white’ people would be the top. ‘ Jones writes with Aletha Maybank, chief health equity officer at the American Medical Association, Uché Blackstock, founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, and Joia Crear Perry, president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative.
Black people have also been disproportionately affected and have died more from the coronavirus than their white counterparts. An analysis from the Brookings Institution published earlier this year showed that the COVID-19 death rate for black people was 3.6 times higher than for whites.
An ABC News study published in April found that black people living in coronavirus hot spots are twice as likely to die from the disease than their white counterparts.
“Dr. Moore knew she was being abused. She knew she was being abused because she knew what to get. So that makes her voice even more powerful when she called them,” Jones told ABC News Wednesday.
Jones said IU Health must recognize that systemic racism exists in its system before it can solve the problem.
“It’s not up to one individual nurse to resolve herself or one individual physician to resolve herself,” Jones said. “You have to involve a lot of people because you understand that racism exists and that it is a problem for the whole system.”