Dr. Simone Gold
speaker
456 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Dr. Simone Gold’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm happy. So I got married. I had two children. I was working as an emergency physician. I'm Jewish. I was exploring Judaism more. It was great. I was living in Beverly Hills. Doing anything with your legal training? I was not. I did a little bit of writing, a little bit of policy writing for some independent people on the side.
And I was always very interested, but I was in the years of raising kids and working.
So I'm super, obviously, as it turns out, as a human, I'm super interested in fixing systems. I'm super interested in efficiencies. But politics, no. So I never even considered going to politics.
So thank you for the question because everywhere I worked, I was always pulled in to do something to fix how the ER was running. For example, an efficiency that you could have in emergency rooms where I don't know how it is in Canada, but in America, there's long lines. It's very inefficient. And I said, well, we should put a doctor up front, right in triage.
So because at least a third of our patients could go home immediately. Right, right. Right? So it's called PIT, physician in triage. So physician in triage is super efficient. So I was a big proponent of that, for example, and everywhere I worked would pull me in to organize the systems. And that's also when I learned nothing really ever gets done typically. You know, I write up these big plans.
I do tons of volunteer hours. I'm like, this is how you have to do it. I was like that eager beaver, like, this is how you do it. It'll be so much better. It'll be so much more efficient. And then, you know, it would fall flat. There's...
So that is so disappointing about human nature. That took me forever to realize people didn't want to actually fix the problem. I got a tip from a colleague of mine when I was so disappointed that the plans, much like you had, nobody's implementing them, nobody's doing these better plans. And a friend of mine, a colleague said, don't you know why they have hospital committees? Why?
That's to delay things. He goes, I successfully delayed this policy that I didn't want to have happen for two years. And when I could delay it no longer, I quit the committee. That was advice from a colleague. So I was a little bit, well, you know what? I'm not going to, one thing I won't do is waste my time. So I was kind of done.
That was correct.
I'm not wasting my time.
So that's exactly it. But I want to share with you because it's interesting and became relevant later. I always had a heart for working with minority communities, poor, underserved communities. So really that's what I did all of my career. I was working in just super hardcore. You might have heard of the Boys in the Hood, the movie took place in Inglewood. It's like super hardcore.
Like I was the only white face there. And I liked that kind of work. I gravitated towards that kind of work. So I was working at Sentinella Hospital for a lot of years in the heart of Englewood, California. Happens to be about 15 minutes or so, 20 minutes from LA International Airport. Now UCLA is five to 10 minutes further, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is five to 10 minutes further.
Those are both world-class research institutions. 2014 rolls around and we get the Ebola scare. And the powers that be decide that my hospital should be the receiving hospital for any potential Ebola patients that somehow flew from West Africa to LAX. So they're landing here now. This is a foreshadow of what came during COVID. This is 2014.
And I'm puzzling over this thing, wondering why you would be bringing Ebola patients to this poor inner city hospital that has no resources. I'm saying that you could probably be in central Mexico and it would be about the same. And I was stunned by it. Now my peers, not thinking, thought this was sort of exciting. And I, as an ER doctor, love the excitement of emergencies, but this made no sense.
So we start the Ebola training that we're going through, and they break out these hazmat suits that we were seeing during COVID, the blue, right? And I was like, well, this doesn't stop the Ebola virus. Like, why are we doing this? Like, why are we putting on paper, blue paper, like over our body? And nobody was asking those foundational questions.
And I was the highest ranking person at the time there. And so people listened to me. And I said, you know what I'm doing if a potential Ebola patient comes here from LAX? What are you doing, Dr. Gold? Yeah, I'm leaving. And people were so shocked to hear me say that, right? Because I'm compassionate and I'm kind. I said, no, no, no, no, no. It's not even about me.
I said, who's being put at risk? My poor inner city black nurse who just shows up for work that day, she's supposed to be exposed to Ebola. I don't even know, I'm the doctor. I can like stand back and just be thinking. She's the one who has to draw blood. She's the one who has to get close to the patient.
And you're saying, because somehow the CDC is failing to capture someone 7,000 miles away, they're on a flight and they're coming to the poor inner city hospital and they're not going to UCLA and they're not going to Cedars-Sinai, that's okay? I said, this is not okay. And I put my foot down and I completely refused. And it was very stunning. This was 2014.
This was 2014 and people were stunned because I'd never reacted like that before. But let me tell you what the problems were. One, it was irrational what they were trying to teach us. Blue paper, not going to stop the Ebola virus.
Two, don't bring me someone who managed to fly 7,000 miles and somebody in Washington is going to say, but that's okay, we'll just bring him to this poor hospital that has no resources. If she gets stuck with a needle and dies from Ebola two days later, that's no big deal. I had a huge problem with that.
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