Perhaps it's time to go back to basics. First, do no harm.
Regardless of which way your politics fall, regardless of your religious beliefs and practices, regardless of ethnicity, this week has been, at best, intense, and at worst, deeply disquieting and disappointing.
Unless you have been living under a rock – and I can see the appeal – you will be aware of the two Bankstown Hospital nurses who got on a social media platform in the middle of a nightshift, spewed hatred towards patients of a different background to themselves – in this case, patients of Israeli descent – and threatened to harm anyone of that background who came into their sphere of care.
Those two nurses have been deregistered nationally, have exercised their right not to voluntarily submit themselves to police interview, and are suffering a variety of mental health battles that has landed at least one of them in hospital.
They have, in all likelihood, killed off their careers. One of them says it was joke gone wrong. It could be argued they were provoked into a response by a renowned “influencer” who makes a practice of poking the bear.
Whatever. It was hateful, offensive, and mind-numbingly, depressingly stupid. Dumb and vile in one fell swoop.
Now, I am not about to start talking about the ins and outs of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I’m married to a former theologian – I know there are layers and complexities way beyond the scope of this publication.
What is in our scope, however, is the impact this incident has reportedly had on a sacred pact that all healthcare workers and all patients not only understand but have relied on for centuries.
That pact says that healthcare practitioners treat the person in front of them, no matter the differences between themselves and their patients.
Healers in war zones have tended the broken bodies in front of them, no matter what uniform they bleed through. Conscientious objectors to things like VAD and abortion refer patients on to practitioners who are willing to provide those solutions.
This week I had the privilege of talking to a variety of doctors and academics of Jewish background who were devastated by the goings-on at Bankstown.
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Putting aside the anti-Semitism, for a moment, what all said in common was that it had shaken their trust in their colleagues and the collegiality of treating patients together.
“How can I trust what my colleagues are thinking?” said one surgeon. “How do I know now that we are able to work together, able to treat all patients equally? How can I trust how they feel about me as a colleague?”
Their angst is understandable.
But let’s not kid ourselves that this “pact” to treat all patients equally has been sacrosanct until these two now former nurses came along.
If you’re a woman, if you’re queer, if you’re Indigenous or any person of colour, if you’re disabled, if you’re homeless, then you know that not all patients are treated equally in our health system – there are inherent, sometimes unconscious, sometimes utterly intentional systemic biases throughout. Thankfully it’s rarely as overt and horrifying as this incident.
The other reaction in common between the doctors I spoke with this week was their happiness with the response of the NSW government.
One does wonder what the government and regulators’ reactions would have been if the two nurses had been whites hating on Indigenous, or men hating on women, or cis hets hating on trans folk.
That is not to minimise the reactions of people of Jewish or Israeli background to this week’s incident. The hatred was extreme, threatening and particularly foully expressed. The horror is justified.
Perhaps this week’s events present an opportunity to tackle, not only anti-Semitism, but every kind of – for want of a better word – hatred present in the system.
A chance perhaps to make that sacred pact a reality for everyone.