Last week, a jury awarded $21 million to Dr. Benjamin Danielson, the Black former medical director of a clinic serving low-income children run by Seattle Children’s Hospital, who sued the hospital for racial discrimination against patients and for creating a hostile work environment based on race. In his lawsuit, Danielson said hospital leaders failed to remedy known practices of systemic racism, including disproportionate use of security against Black patients, lack of translation services, racial inequities in how it provided health care, and subjecting its Black and Brown employees to a double standard of conduct, reported the Seattle Times. He also alleged that Dr. Jim Hendricks, a hospital administrator, used racist terms 15 years ago, calling him the N-word and referring to people of Asian descent as “Japs,” misconduct that the hospital ignored, according to Crosscut. Benjamin Danielson (Photo: Wikipedia) Danielson, who resigned from the hospital in protest over unaddressed racism in 2020, claimed that he saw Black patients treated differently because of their race, such as nurses calling security after hearing a Black patient’s raised voice. An internal report led by the hospital’s Center for Diversity and Health Equity found that from 2008 to 2011, security calls on Black patients at Seattle Children’s were more than twice as likely as they were for white patients. That disparity continued through 2021, per an analysis of hospital data later done by the Seattle Times. One such episode involved the Black father of a sick child being escorted away by a security officer after requesting for staff to use a needleless injection device on his child — as a doctor had ordered  — instead of numbing cream. This treatment left the man feeling embarrassed, demoralized and perceived as a criminal, the report said. When some patients with sickle cell disease, a blood disorder that can cause severe pain and that affects many Black people, requested and received pain medication, they would sometimes fall asleep or have slurred speech. Staff would deem these patients “addicts,” Anderson alleged, or try to restrict their pain medication. After Danielson resigned and amid public outcry, Seattle Children’s Hospital hired former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and his Washington, D.C.-based law firm, Covington & Burling, to conduct an independent investigation.   In a summary of the 11 findings, the firm found that while Seattle Children’s had improved its racial and ethnic diversity, “racial disparities persist in leadership positions, promotions and voluntary terminations.” The investigation described a “culture of conflict avoidance and failure to address microaggressions” and “an environment that excludes and undervalues BIPOC workforce members” within the hospital system. Investigators also found that the hospital did not “adequately investigate or address” the 2009 allegation that Hendricks referred to Danielson “using a racist epithet.”  Hendricks, then-president of Seattle Children’s Research Institute, was forced to resign in 2021 after Danielson’s allegations of the incident publicly surfaced. He denied having used the racial slur, and the hospital later argued that the alleged slur was an isolated incident, not evidence of a pattern of racial discrimination or of a hostile racial atmosphere. Danielson, who for 20 years led the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic at Seattle Children’s Hospital, which serves children of color and low-income families, said he and other Black and minority staff members felt afraid to speak out about racism for fear of retaliation by upper management. A prominent pediatrician in Seattle, he had won widespread respect among local residents and community leaders for fighting for equitable health access and for exposing the health impacts of racism during his tenure, according to Crosscut. In 2018, Danielson was selected as the Seattle Municipal League’s “Citizen of the Year” and served on mayoral task forces. At the time he resigned, Danielson was pushing for changes in how Black patients and staff were treated at both the existing clinic and at a new satellite clinic in the Othello neighborhood south of Seattle, which was being built to serve Black residents who had been pushed out of the city. It opened in 2022. In his lawsuit, he alleged that when he and others expressed concern that funds raised to expand the clinic’s services and to build the second site were not being spent on the clinic, hospital leaders retaliated against him and launched an investigation into his leadership, the Times reported. The hospital argued that it launched its investigation into Danielson in the spring of 2020 after receiving complaints about HIPAA violations from staff members who alleged that he had discussed two employees’ COVID diagnoses as part of the clinic’s contact-tracing measures. The internal investigation found he had violated policy by disclosing personal health information. “On the basis of these findings — and these findings alone — SCH and UW determined Plaintiff was not living up to the expectations of his leadership position as Senior Medical Director at OBCC,” the hospital’s trial brief said.  The hospital demanded he undergo a “360 review and training” and imposed administrative changes to his role, Danielson said. The hospital said he was offered the opportunity to work with an executive coach, but he rejected the coaching and “flatly refused to allow his peers and subordinates to evaluate him.”  “Ultimately, the experience helped Dr. Danielson realize that he no longer could change SCH from the inside,” attorneys for Danielson wrote in their trial brief. He resigned in November 2020.  Danielson “had to show up at an institution every day for work where racial issues were so pervasive and so predominant that … it made it difficult for him as a Black man to go into a white space,” said Rebecca Roe, one of Danielson’s attorneys, during closing statements. Some staff members at Seattle Children’s corroborated Danielson’s account of the hospital’s treatment of patients and staff members of color.  In a declaration filed in court in September, Dr. Corrie Anderson, who started in 2001 at Seattle Children’s as the director of pain management services, said he experienced racism “from my first days at SCH.”  Anderson alleged he was frequently met with resistance and opposition, alleging that some of his colleagues “seemed to have a problem with having a Black doctor as a superior,” he wrote in his declaration.  “As the head administrator I was directly confronted with people on the service hostile to my leadership, and heard from others on the service that many people were making negative comments about me,” he wrote. In his lawsuit, Danielson was not seeking economic damages in the form of back pay or front pay but noneconomic damages to compensate him “for the harms he endured as a result of the hostile work environment and retaliation (including) emotional distress, humiliation, personal indignity, anxiety, and disillusionment, both past and future for each type of harm.” Following the large jury verdict, Danielson’s team of trial attorneys thanked their witnesses, the jurors and the community members who “stood by Dr. Danielson’s side against racism.” “This is what a Reckoning looks like,” they said in a statement. Danielson, who now practices pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said he was grateful for the jury decision and stunned at the amount of money they awarded. There are “a lot of other people who suffer more in situations like this,” he said, adding, “This does not fix racism. These are wounds we’ll carry the rest of our lives, in some ways.” Attorneys representing Seattle Children’s countered that Danielson is a talented, charismatic pediatrician who refused feedback on his leadership and suffered from a “bruised ego.” He was, they argued, angry and frustrated to not have complete control over funding decisions related to the clinic and its expansion to the second location. “He didn’t quit because he needed to do so in order to force change, in order to compel a reckoning,” said Portia Moore, an attorney representing Seattle Children’s, during closing statements. “He quit because he realized that he would no longer be able to unilaterally dictate how OBCC, including OBCC Othello, would be run.”  Responding to the verdict, Seattle Children’s Hospital released this statement: “As the region’s largest, independent nonprofit children’s hospital, our priority is to ensure every child has access to high quality, equitable care regardless of the ability to pay and to support the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic mission to deliver quality care with dignity. Based on the lack of evidence presented, we are extremely disappointed in this extraordinary award and are evaluating our options.” Black Children with Sickle Cell Seeking Pain Meds Called ‘Addicts’: Jury Awards $21M To Black Doctor After He Exposed Shocking Racism at Seattle Children’s Hospital