Not a healthy option
To the Editor:
I was very disappointed by the position taken by Donna Gentile O'Donnell in her recent column ("Learning medical ethics the hard way," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 10/21/03) on the recent scandal at Abington Memorial Hospital.
To start with, the request to have other than a minority professional had not come from the patient, but from the patient's husband, who should have had little say in the matter. The position of the woman patient was not even addressed.
For almost 30 years, I was a clinical psychologist at the Chicago VA and the Northwestern University Medical Center. Requests to change to a different professional because of racial or ethnic preferences were never honored. When the policy was explained in a matter-of-fact manner to the person requesting the change, the refusal to honor his request was typically accepted by the requester.
The fact that the patients were in need of our services constituted the best possible situation for them to learn that people from other backgrounds can be competent and caring. In the cases when any of our policies were not accepted by a patient or a patient's relative, we took whatever action was appropriate, from simply allowing the individual to seek care someplace else to having security escort the person out of the building. In a dire emergency (which the case of a person "in possibly active labor" is not), the medical center would have administered whatever care was necessary by the appropriate personnel, even if it was against the patient's wishes.
Given my professional experiences with similar cases, I was upset that the university where my grandfather went to medical school, and where my daughter is a student, did not already have a set policy to deal with such contingencies. We do have to attend to our patients first, but we must address their social and psychological health as well as their physical health. To allow a social cancer like the one reflected by the request to persist is not a healthy option for anyone, least of all for the patient and her husband.
James Choca
Psychology professor
Roosevelt University
