Children’s Hospitals Need Doctors, Not Social Workers and Political Activists

Some things should be obvious, like the idea that children’s hospitals should focus on children’s health. Not so fast, say the experts at the Children’s Hospital Association. They want doctors at these critical institutions to be more like social workers and political activists than medical professionals.

The CHA made that clear in March when discussing “a creative way to make time for DEI training.” It wants doctors to spend more time learning about the “social determinants of health,” a clever phrase that woke activists use to describe things that aren’t in the domain of health care. That includes everything from homelessness to poverty to food insecurity and beyond.

These are serious problems that need real solutions, without question. But doctors – including those at children’s hospitals – aren’t suited to tackle them. A doctor’s job is to treat patients’ individual medical needs. Making them focus on things like homelessness and poverty turns them into political activists. For the people pushing this, that’s a feature, not a bug.

Proponents of DEI want doctors to be activists because it helps them achieve their goal of transforming society along divisive ideological lines. They want doctors to get behind things like a bigger welfare state, more government intervention in the economy, and a federal bureaucracy that picks winners and losers based on skin color. Apparently, sacrificing the mission of health care is an acceptable cost to achieving this vision.

Doctors should stick to treating individual patients’ medical needs. We already have social workers who help people address other challenges in life. We also already have plenty of activists who can advocate for the policies they want. Medical professionals should focus on medicine, at children’s hospitals and everywhere else.