Question: Abington Memorial Hospital is a 508-bed hospital located in Abington, Pennsylvania. It services patients from Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs of Bucks and Montgomery counties. The hospital's mission "is to provide patients with the highest quality care possible, regardless of the health-care professionals' race. . . ." Supervisors at the hospital told African-American healthcare professionals, as well as food-service and housekeeping staff, not to enter a certain white patient's room or interact with the family. This caused an outrage among the African-American staff. Abington administrators said they broke hospital policy to avoid a potentially "volatile situation" by adhering to the request of the patient's husband: Only white employees could enter his wife's room on the maternity ward. "We were wrong," said Meg McGoldrick, a vice president at Abington Memorial Hospital. "We should have followed our policy. The whole incident has greatly upset many of our employees who perceived that we were acquiescing to the family's wishes.''

Despite the hospital's policy that states, "care will be provided on a nondiscriminatory basis," the administrators' actions seemed as though patients were allowed to discriminate. Catholic Health Care West's medical ethicist, Carol Bayley, said that Abington failed in its responsibility to its employees and the community to accommodate a patient's racial preference: "This was a fundamental disrespect of these professionals' skills and their fundamental dignities . . . a hospital needs to stand against this undercurrent of racism in our society." The Philadelphia office of the AntiDefamation League (ADL) said that prohibiting African-American employees from carrying out the full scope of their duties is reprehensible. "I don't see why and how a hospital could justify accommodating a request that the professionals attending to a patient be of a particular background," said Barry Morrison, director of the Philadelphia chapter of the ADL; he added, "Certainly, it's demoralizing for the people who work there."

The American Hospital Association (AHA), the largest hospital association in the United States, acknowledged that no hardand-fast industry guidelines exist for hospitals to follow when a patient or a family member makes a racially biased request. AHA does not offer hospitals a suggestion on how to address this situation. "It's subjective," said Rick Wade, senior vice president at the AHA. "I'm sure the person who made the decision at Abington thought they were doing the right thing." McGoldrick said supervisors at Abington were acting with good intentions and sought to deflect any confrontation between its African-American staff and the Caucasian family. No incident was reported during the patient's stay. Since then, Abington's president, Richard L. Jones, sent a letter to all its employees and volunteers apologizing for the situation, which he termed "morally reprehensible." In addition to creating a diversity task force at the 508-bed hospital, Abington has hired consultants and revised its antidiscrimination policy.

The AHA bestowed on Abington the Quest for Quality Award for raising awareness of the need for an organizational commitment to patient safety and quality. Wade said hospitals are constantly evaluating how to provide the best treatment for their patients, while protecting and maintaining the dignity of their employees. He said that a hospital's constant patient turnover sometimes subjected workers to society's underbelly. "Perhaps Abington could have been more protective of their employees," Wade said. "Patients come and go, [but] the most important thing at a hospital is the work-force," he said.