Dr. Ben Danielson, Odessa Brown Clinic, 2015, photo credit: Josephine Ensign

I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Ben Danielson when he was the medical director of Seattle Children’s Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic in the Central District. I was a nurse practitioner at the co-located community health clinic, the Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center. I remember conferring with Dr. Danielson over the care of a young adult woman with sickle cell disease who had aged out of care at the pediatric Odessa Brown Clinic. Most of our patients were African American, Latino, and recent immigrants. Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center began as a Black Panther community clinic. Both clinics have long histories of providing quality care to people marginalized by race, ethnicity, and poverty.

Five years after I interviewed Dr. Danielson at the Odessa Brown Clinic in 2015, he resigned in protest over alleged racism towards the clinic’s patients and him by Seattle Children’s Hospital. Since then, he has helped launch a project to address the overrepresentation of Black and Latino young people, especially males, in our King County Juvenile Detention Center. This is an issue he talked about in his interview with me. “With a system that is so broken, and feeds other broken systems that fail people consistently and predictably–in other words, fail, especially young African American males–it’s hard to see yourself feeding into that. (…) Maybe our health system is set up to keep young Black males just well enough to feed them into a system of enslavement in the prison systems. That’s a heavy thing. That’s a powerful thing to think about. How much are we doing that is just supporting a process that is so harmful to so many people?”

Dr. Danielson also spoke of lessons he learned from Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Thomas, the first African American to graduate from the University of Washington’s pediatric nurse practitioner program. “When I had finished my official orientation to the job here, she (Liz) grabbed me by the ear, took me aside, and told me what I really needed to do to do a good job. And she said, ‘You have to get outside of these walls. You cannot just do medicine at the length of your stethoscope. Good care is care that happens as much for the kids who never come into this clinic as it does for the kids that do.’ More than that, she also pushed me to think a lot more about treating kids before they’re kids–pregnancy–and helping mothers have healthy pregnancies so that they have healthy births, so that they have healthy kids, and that that sequence is really important.”