US doctor who spoke out about Covid-19 safety sues hospital that fired him

An emergency room doctor fired after speaking out about the
lack of coronavirus safety protections at his workplace in Washington state is
suing the hospital for wrongful termination.
Dr Ming Lin, who spoke to the Guardian from a reservation in
South Dakota, where he works intermittently in an emergency room, said at the
heart of this lawsuit is the issue of healthcare workers being free to speak
out about safety concerns.
“For frontline workers to be threatened or silenced, it’s
just wrong,” he said. “We put our life out there and we should have a right to
speak out if we see something that’s unsafe.”
Dr Lin said since posting about his experience he has heard
from hundreds of healthcare workers who have gone through a similar situation
at other hospitals. One doctor, for example, told him about getting written up
after she provided N100 masks for her nurses, while an anesthesiologist told
him he was removed from his shifts when he wore an N95 mask inside an intensive
care unit.
“I hope this lawsuit brings this to light and maybe there’s
some legislative change that can be done,” he added.
In late February, when the coronavirus outbreak in the US
was just beginning, Lin said he started to grow concerned about the safety
practices at PeaceHealth St Joseph medical center in Bellingham, where he had
been a physician for 17 years.
“We’re not doing as
much as we can to protect our patients and healthcare workers,” he said he
realized. “So I decided to go to social media.”
Lin started posting on his public Facebook account about not
having enough protective equipment, long delays in receiving coronavirus test
results, and risky virus screening practices in which patients were evaluated
inside the waiting room.
According to the lawsuit, he sent a message to the hospital
about his concerns and received a response stating that PeaceHealth’s PR
department was “upset”.
By late March, the hospital had removed Dr Lin, who has
about 30 years’ experience as a physician, from all of his shifts.
Now he has teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union
of Washington in order to get his job back as well as monetary relief for “lost
wages, economic damages and emotional distress”, explained Jamal Whitehead, an
ACLU-WA cooperating attorney.
The lawsuit was also filed against Richard DeCarlo,
PeaceHealth’s chief operating officer, and TeamHealth, a national medical
staffing company. It references the fact that the hospital and TeamHealth have
no social media policies prohibiting Facebook use.
Since going public with his concerns about safety practices
at St Joseph, Dr Lin said the hospital had addressed all of the issues he
brought up.
PeaceHealth said in a statement that they asked TeamHealth
to remove Dr Lin because “he chose to not use designated safety reporting
channels, and his actions were disruptive, compromised collaboration in the
midst of a crisis and contributed to the creation of fear and anxiety among
staff and the community.”
TeamHealth said in a statement on Thursday that Dr Lin was
still a paid TeamHealth physician and that they had offered to find another
hospital placement for him.
Dr Lin said that if he were to take another position it
would mean uprooting his wife and three young children to move to another part
of the country, which he described as not reasonable.