Seattle Children’s Hospital Found Responsible For Racial Discrimination & Creating Hostile Work Environment For Black Employees

The lawsuit was brought about by former employee and Black doctor Benjamin Danielson, who described the working conditions and treatment of non-white patients at the hospital.

On Dec. 23, a jury declared the Seattle Children’s Hospital guilty of creating a race-based hostile work environment against the former Black medical director of the hospital’s Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, Benjamin Danielson. The lawsuit awarded Danielson $21 million in damages.

As a result of the racial discrimination verdict, a trial that brought to light the effects of systemic racism in the white-dominated medical field and an individual’s hospital management’s responsibility to mitigate harmful inequity was finally concluded.

Danielson served as director of the Seattle Children’s Hospital clinic for well over two decades. In this position, he upheld the clinic’s original mission, begun over 50 years ago: to help increase healthcare access for Black people and to bring attention to their racially divided treatment and health outcomes. The Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic primarily focused on serving families of color and low-income individuals.

Despite the original mission of the clinic, Danielson filed a lawsuit and sued the Seattle Children’s Hospital system and resigned in November 2020 after accusing the children’s hospital of perpetuating institutionalized racism against its patients and Black employees. He claimed that the hospital management allowed race-based disparities to grow and retaliated against employees who drew attention to the issues. The lawsuit caused an independent investigation to be launched.

Danielson’s lawsuit states that Seattle Hospital created a racialized hostile work environment, “including by permitting the use of racial slurs, failing to remedy known incidents of systemic racism, fostering an environment of conformity to the status quo of racial inequity, and subjecting its Black and Brown employees to a double standard of conduct.”

He continued to call out a hospital administrator in particular, Dr. Jim Hendricks, for reportedly calling him the N-word and referring to Asian people inside the hospital as “Japs.” Danielson alleged that the hospital ignored all of these instances of misconduct.

The administration was not only complacent in the racist environment but also contributed. Danielson said that the hospital disproportionately used security against Black people and that security calls on Black patients at Seattle Children’s were more than twice as likely as they were for white patients for similar incidents. They also systematically undermedicated Black patients with sickle cell disease, which is a blood disorder that can cause severe pain in those afflicted and one that overwhelmingly affects Black people. The hospital reportedly undermedicated these patients due to “a racial stereotype that they or their families were drug seeking.”

One specific incident described in the lawsuit outlined the treatment of a Black father who advocated for his sick child. The father was escorted away by hospital security after requesting the doctors to use a needleless injection device on his child instead of a needle and numbing cream.

According to the lawsuit, he said, “As a Black man, being escorted away from my very sick child by a security officer left me powerless, embarrassed, and seen in the eyes of other families on the unit as a criminal.”

Danielson’s attorneys recited an independent investigation by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm as evidence of the lawsuit’s claims. The investigation found that Seattle Children’s “culture of conflict avoidance and failure to address microaggressions, combined with widespread distrust in the Human Resources function, contributes to an environment that excludes and undervalues BIPOC workforce members.”

According to Health Affairs, the claims made by Danielson against Seattle Children’s are not isolated, and they reflect a broader issue in the medical field of doctors systemically implementing race bias in their practices.

For example, Black patients are seen as being more “aggressive” when expressing their pain and tend to meet with security guards rather than adequate treatment, are believed to have higher pain tolerance than their white counterparts, and are consistently undermedicated or treated as drug-seeking, and tend to be criminalized for advocating themselves within a system that is wrought with race-based health disparities.