Dozens of protesters rally outside Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Thursday, demanding that the health system acknowledge “system failure” in its maternal care and set up a board to investigate racial disparities, saying a federal agreement with Cedars-Sinai It is not far away enough to protect patients.
“For those who have the ability to change the system, we hope you do better,” said Gabrielle Brown, who coordinates Black women’s mother and baby health programs in education and advocacy groups.
The protests were led by 4KIRA4MOMS, founded by Charles Johnson, whose wife Kira Dixon Johnson bleed in Cedars-Sinai after a cesarean section nearly nine years ago. The widow sued Cedar-Sini and the doctor involved in her care, eventually reaching the settlement of these lawsuits.
Cedars-Sinai said in a statement that it has the “common goal of ensuring high quality, safe and equitable care for all delivery patients” and has joined 4KIRA4MOMS and proposed to meet with the group.
The health system also said, “In the past decade, this has sparked a lot of efforts to understand and address the impact of bias in health care and promote equitable outcomes for our delivery patients, including the introduction of online tools to report allegedly on anonymously. Prejudice in labor and delivery environments.
Following Kira Johnson’s death, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Civil Rights Office began an investigation into how Cedars-Sinai treats pregnant women of color.
The agency told the health system in a letter in November that its review “found evidence that Cedar-Sinai may have engaged in a model of inaction and/or neglect of health risks associated with Black obstetric patients.” Then, the Office of Civil Rights, then, A voluntary agreement was reached with Cedars-Sinai last month to resolve allegations faced by the health system.
The agreement should be monitored by federal officials for three years, including steps designed to improve the prognosis of pregnant women of color, including promoting opportunities to Duras during labor, and sharing findings about suspicious biased events reported to Cedars-Sinai .
Johnson and other advocates say the federal agreement is not what it needs to be. 4KIRA4MOMS calls on Cedars-Sinai to suspend any clinicians associated with discrimination or negligence and urges it to form an independent oversight committee to investigate racial disparities in care, among other steps.
What is missing from the agreement is community oversight and “accountability – acknowledging that they have problems”.
A federal agreement with Cedars-Sinai was announced on January 16, the four-day inauguration of President Trump, whose administration aims to target “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.” During the protests, Johnson urged the Trump administration to provide funding for the HHS Office of Civil Rights.
He said to cheer: “If you want to make sure that America is great, you can’t make sure that every single mother in this country has a safe, dignified childbirth experience.”
State data show that in California, black women have more than three times the death rate than white women. Nationwide, the latest report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that maternal mortality among black women failed to improve when other groups declined.
Prior to Trump’s takeover, a CDC website listed structural racism and implicit bias, many factors blamed for differences, in line with long-time cited findings by health researchers and advocates echo. As of early February, the CDC website has been changed to remove references to these factors, mentioning only differences in health care and fundamental chronic diseases.
