Woman says nursing agency asked her if she was okay being assigned nurse of colour

MONTREAL – A Quebec woman says she when she went into surgery last fall, staff asked her if it was okay if a nurse of colour tended to her post-op.

Fatima Tokhmafshan took to social media to share her story recently, explaining in September she called a nursing agency to hire a caregiver to help her in her recovery since she didn’t have family in Quebec that could step in.

She says Code Bleu, a private caregiver agency that often receives government contracts asked her if she preferred to not have a Black, Moroccan, Algerian, or Filipino take care of her post-surgery.

4- I was so shocked by the question, I asked her to repeat it. She clarified that they have to ask this question b/c some of their older clientele don’t like to be, and I quote, “touched” by people from these backgrounds!

— Fatima Tokhmafshan (@DeNovo_Fatima) March 14, 2021

“She clarified by saying that it’s a ‘routine’ question we have to ask because some of our clientele don’t feel comfortable–and I quote—’being touched by certain people,’” shared Tokhmafshan, who is a geneticist and science communicator by trade.

RELATED: 

• Family wants answers after death of Quebec woman, who posted to social media pleading for help
• Quebec health officials investigate job posting requiring applicants be white women
• Indigenous women’s group wants allegations Quebec nurses mocked patient investigated
• Quebec health authority hires Indigenous staff, promises changes after Echaquan death

 

“I faintly recall her mentioning other ethnicities as well, but as a racialized woman myself, my ears were ringing. I was totally shocked.”

Jill Eusanio, managing director of Comfort Keepers, which provides hundreds of nurses and home-care workers to the province as needed, says she refuses any requests for white staff.

“There are clients that are mentally unstable. I mean, there are racists in Quebec and they are unstable and if you send them someone who’s Black to give them personal hygiene and personal care they can react very negatively to that they can verbally assault the caregivers whose working. But you have to understand the reasoning behind it,” said Eusanio.

“But we’re an equal opportunity [place]. There’s nobody that will lose hours for these types of files.”

Premier Francois Legault has denied systemic racism exists within Quebec, but a health justice activist says stories like these show that Canada’s universal healthcare isn’t all that universal.

“Especially frontline workers in community care homes, long-term care, are women and often racialized women. So when we say systemic racism is present in our healthcare systems, these are the kinds of stories. This is what we mean by that,” said Dr. Naheed Dosani, a palliative care physician.

6- Please take a few moments to ponder the systemic barriers this young mother is facing to break the cycle of poverty for her family & provide for them!
But there is more …

— Fatima Tokhmafshan (@DeNovo_Fatima) March 14, 2021

“A person should never be excluded. And this falls under the labour laws that we have in this province and everywhere else in the country, that a person should not be excluded from doing a job based on their demographic identifiers,” said Tokhmafshan.

“We are systematically excluding certain people from earning a living just based on their ethnicity. And as a geneticist, I can tell you race and ethnicity have no basis biologically. They are 100 per cent socio-cultural constructs.”

CityNews reached out to Code Bleu, but has yet to receive a response.

Eusanio says discriminatory questions are not routine for all agencies.

“We would never on the phone say would you mind someone who’s black or with a veil–this would never happen,” said Eusanio.

“It is absolutely deplorable to hear that our health systems are promoting options for people to have their healthcare workers by choice of race. Not only does this continue to promote racism within our healthcare institutions, it favours people who are white over racialized workers who have more difficulty gaining employment suffer because of more precarious employment and are suffering in a pandemic that hits them harder to begin with,” said Dosani.

Tokhmafshan says her Twitter thread detailing her experience has led to a lot of people reaching out to her sharing their own stories.

“I have received close to 500 DMs and I haven’t been able to go through all of them, but I have read a little over 100 of them. And some of them have been extremely difficult to read. I had to step away and take a break because these are real experiences, people who have experienced ethnolinguistic discrimination throughout the healthcare system,” she said.