Researchers refuse to alter patient safety papers to comply with Trump orders

Some researchers who have published on a government patient safety website are refusing to alter their reports to comply with Trump administration executive orders around language, leaving them offline.

Gordon Schiff, MD, of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, is the author of a 2022 case report and commentary on suicide risk assessment that includes a line noting several groups at high risk of suicide, including the LGBTQ community.

Rather than remove the line, the piece remains off the Patient Safety Network, which is part of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

"I think as a matter of principle, it's not a good idea to give into this," Schiff told MedPage Today.

"We could find alternate ways of publishing it, I guess," he said. "And I think we don't want to legitimize this process of what's happened. I think it would be a mistake. It would be a disservice, actually, to cave in. I think people do need to stand up and say, this is not okay."

Patrick Romano, MD, MPH, of the University of California Davis and co-editor-in-chief of the Patient Safety Network, told MedPage Today that five full-length, peer-reviewed cases and commentaries, at least one perspective interview, and about 15 short summaries of other published papers, remain offline. (However, they can still be accessed via the Internet Archive.)

Removal of these resources occurred in the wake of a Trump administration Office of Personnel Management (OPM) memorandum, "Initial Guidance Regarding President Trump's Executive Order Defending Women."

Each of the removed resources had a term, such as "transgender," "gender identity," "non-gender-conforming," "LGBTQ," or "LGBTQIA," that violated OPM guidance, according to Romano.

Though Romano told MedPage Today that the authors of the resources have been given the opportunity to revise their work to have it republished on the site, all of them have declined to accept the required changes.

Ultimately, concern has extended beyond the recently removed resources. There has been "some worry," with regard to the word "equity," Romano said.

For instance, "when we talk about equity on [the Patient Safety Network site] we're talking about treating patients equitably," he said. "We're talking about making sure that patients get diagnosed in an equitable manner, and that, for example, people who live in rural communities don't suffer because of the lack of accessibility to sub-specialty providers."

So, "it's different from talking about equity in the occupational context, or in the context of recruitment or admission to elite universities, and so forth," he said, adding that, "as these words are targeted, I think a lot of us are concerned about all the different ways in which those words are used, and the importance of the underlying concept that is really essential as we try to take better care of patients and communities."

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Source: MedPage Today, 20 February 2025