Nurse Claims Hospital Fired Him for Criticizing DEI on Social Media
“It’s fine to oppose diversity, equity and inclusion as long as you keep it to yourself.”
Do you think this man would have gotten fired for criticizing Trump or any Republican policies? Somehow, I doubt it.
From the Wall Street Journal:
DEI Got Me Sacked From My Nursing Job
It’s fine to oppose diversity, equity and inclusion as long as you keep it to yourself. The moment you speak out, you have a target on your back. That’s the lesson I learned in February. I made the mistake of questioning DEI on my personal social-media account. The hospital where I worked fired me within days.
I’ve been a registered nurse for 16 years. In 2021 I began working in the emergency department at Meritus Medical Center in Hagerstown, Md., rising to assistant clinical manager in February 2023. Since I oversaw nurses, my highest priority after providing the best care to patients was protecting my team. That’s what got me into trouble.
Like many states, Maryland has been foisting DEI courses on medical professionals for several years. Since 2022 the state has required that all healthcare professionals take “implicit bias” training, largely in response to worries about black maternal mortality. The state has also committed to reducing disparities in severe maternal morbidity between black and white women over the next three years. My hospital began using a course called “B.I.R.T.H Equity Maryland,” which stands for Breaking Inequality Reimagining Transformative Healthcare.
I took the first session of the course in July 2023. I was bombarded with evidence-free claims that implicit bias has caused a crisis of maternal mortality in black women. The course ignored the complex factors that contribute to higher black maternal mortality, including comorbidities, while defining any death from any cause after a year of giving birth as maternal mortality—a logical stretch.
Overall, the course implied that white nurses like me are killing black mothers. I was supposed to internalize this message and somehow apply it to the management of my team.
In January, Meritus sent me materials for another DEI course for hospital leaders. The materials asserted, among other things, that the U.S. is built on “an ideology of White supremacy that justifies policies, practices and structures which result in social arrangements of subordination for groups of color through power and White privilege.”
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Comments
Spoke out on social media. One week later, fired. There are some gaps to fill in, like what did he say/write on social media, and was he on the verge of being fired (and knew it) just before that and so created a different reason to blame it on. Those would be needed to prove the case in court.
But as for me, I’d say he was fired because of speaking out, and I hope he gets enough money from a lawsuit that he doesn’t have to work anymore.
Read the whole thing. It’s worth it. (And it’s outside the WSJ paywall, at least if you follow the link above.)
All he wrote was: