VA Psychiatrist Wins Settlement After Complaints about Openness as Lesbian

[CatWoman]

This story has been updated.

The Veterans Affairs Department has backed down from a stance that its mental health providers who are gay or lesbian should conceal that fact from patients.


In a settlement announced Tuesday by the Office of Special Counsel, Dr. Patricia Kinne, a psychiatrist who was working at the Louisville VA Medical Center, was awarded “full relief” after a review of patient complaints about her for revealing herself as a lesbian and referring to her wife.


Patients seeking to discontinue their treatment by Kinne had given her sexual orientation as the reason, prompting VA managers to threaten termination if she continued to speak of such “personal information,” which VA considered harmful to the doctor-patient relationship.


The special counsel staff investigation of the discrimination case found that only two of Kinne’s patients had requested transfers to another provider for such a reason, among several hundred requests regarding other psychiatrists involving broader issues in a comparable time period.


Kinne’s settlement included compensation for pain and suffering as well as her legal fees, according to one of her attorneys -- Cathy Harris of Kator, Parks, Weiser & Harris in Washington. A complaint Kinne filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was also resolved.


With Kinne now employed elsewhere in the VA system, the department agreed to improve training of managers and human resource staff at the Louisville facility and notify them that employees are not required to hide their sexual orientation.


http://www.govexec.com/management/2015/05/va-psychiatrist-wins-settlement-after-complaints-about-openness-lesbian/112567/?oref=govexec_today_pm_nl

[HassleCat]

1. Agree With VA

Sorry, but I agree with the VA on this one. Maybe. A psychiatrist should be careful to reveal as little as possible about her personal life. The VA would be right to prohibit her from discussing her personal life with patients, as long as the same prohibition applies to all psychiatrists without regard to sexual orientation. That said, the occasional reference to "my wife" does not constitute what a reasonable person would consider revealing intimate personal details or anything like that. A good friend is a psychiatrist with the VA and she is very, very careful to reveal as little as possible about her personal life. After all, she deals with a group of mostly males, many of whom have disturbing ideas about women, particularly women they perceive as having authority over them.

OK, I read the linked article about Dr. Kinne. She only had two complaints about her sexual orientation, and those two complaints are a drop in the bucket, two out of several hundred. So the VA was wrong in this case.