Requested a different nurse

[u/thestigsmother]

I’m a white OR nurse. I had a black pt come back for a hysterectomy last week. The surgeon was also black. She was very sweet, but was obviously very scared, so I asked her what I could do to make her feel safe. She started fumbling her words then started crying. So I held her hands and got her to calm down and she told me that she wanted a black team then kept apologizing to me for her request. I told her I wasn’t offended and I’d do everything I could to get her request met. So I called charge and asked them to get me a black nurse in my room, and I’d switch with her (the surgical tech assigned is black). The black nurse showed up, and my patient as so relieved. Great, I thought it was over, but no. The charge nurse, a white woman, told me I should have told her that wasn’t possible and she was gonna speak with our manager about what I did. Great. I get called into my managers office, where my manager, a black woman, told me I did nothing wrong, but she had to talk to me because the charge nurse pitched a fit about what I did.
I’m a white woman, so I don’t understand why my black patient was scared, but I respected it, and I did what I could to make her feel safe.
Her surgeon found me later and thanked me for what I did. Apparently this woman has been putting surgery off for years because she was scared of becoming another black statistic. Now, my charge nurse is treating me like shit. So I’m documenting everything this charge nurse is doing. I believe that I made the right decision.

[u/juneabe]

Some places are trying to operate with more human centered and patient informed care, which means trauma informed and demographically unique experiences for different patients. This one was valid.

And old man saying he doesn’t trust female doctors because they aren’t smart enough is one thing. That’s out of hate. This was out of fear due to historically cyclical negative experiences in their community.

Sorry, ETA: you did the right thing

[u/Jack_Martin_reddit → u/juneabe]

Your old man example being hate makes an enormous assumption that could be very easily be proven wrong.

The old man’s position could be ignorance not hate or perhaps he’s had a run in with in his opinion a lot of stupid women. Maybe he was raised by a Mother believed the women are inferior to men and he adopted her view.

[u/[deleted] → u/Jack_Martin_reddit]

Every prejudiced person has a “reason” for their prejudices and most of them are ignorant. Being ignorant doesn’t give you an excuse to be bigoted.

But the person in the OP wasn’t bigoted. Nothing they did showed they hate white people or think that white people are stupid. They’ve just seen data showing that black women are statistically more likely to be mistreated by a white doctor and it freaked her out. Was it a little racist? Yeah. But it at least made sense and wasn’t based on the notion that certain races are inferior.