Investigation reveals massive increase in racial abuse against migrant NHS staff, says report

LONDON June 11: A new Nursing Times investigation has laid bare the scale of racism in the NHS over the last decade.

Each year, thousands of minority ethnic nurses in the NHS experience racism at work. Some are subjected to physical or verbal abuse while on shift: being kicked, spat at or having objects hurled at them, due to race or ethnicity. Others have been subjected to more covert and insidious racism. They are denied promotions and development opportunities, they are the subject of gossip or are threatened with referral to the professional regulator.

A new Nursing Times investigation has laid bare the scale of racism in the NHS over the last decade.

Nursing Times data supports anecdotal evidence by nurses that, despite awareness of racism increasing in recent years, the problem is getting worse, rather than better.

Under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act 2000, Nursing Times asked every NHS trust in England to provide figures on incidents of racism between 2014 and 2024.

This data, which 137 trusts provided, was broken down into incidents of racism against staff by patients, and incidents against staff by staff.

In 2023, the latest full year for which data was provided, there were a total of 8,835 incidents of racism reported across the 137 trusts – equating to 24 incidents per day.

This figure is an 18% increase compared with 2022, and a 105% increase when compared with pre-pandemic levels back in 2019.

One trust provided Nursing Times with examples of incidents it had logged.

In one case, a patient was throwing chairs around the waiting area and using “racist and discriminatory” language towards staff; in another, two staff members were spat at and slapped after confronting a patient who was shouting racial abuse at their colleagues.

Around half (73) of all trusts that provided data reported more incidents of racism in 2023 than in any other year. At 30 trusts, the greatest number of incidents occurred in 2022, and for 20 most took place in 2021.

Meanwhile, 65% of all trusts reported an increase in racist incidents between 2022 and 2023.

In total, 28 trusts only provided Nursing Times with data for the last five years. However, of the 109 trusts that provided the full 10-year dataset, 85% reported higher incidents of racism in 2023 than in 2014.

In addition, figures from trusts that submitted data for one or all of the first few months of 2024 showed an incident count of 864 in that period alone.

This comes as NHS England’s most recent Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) report found that Black and minority ethnic staff made up a quarter (26%) of the NHS workforce and more than a third (34%) of nurses, midwives and health visitors.

The same data also showed that Black and minority ethnic staff were overrepresented in lower-banded roles, with 42% on band 5 contracts compared with just 23% at band 6 and 18% at band 7.

Staff working at lower bands in the NHS are the least likely to report concerns about racial discrimination, because many believe nothing will change as a result, stated the report Too Hot to Handle: Why Concerns about Racism are Not Heard…Or Acted On.

The report, published in January by human rights and equality charity Brap, along with researchers at Middlesex University, also found that many staff were afraid to speak out about their experiences in case they faced repercussions.

One nurse told Nursing Times that speaking up about racism would only result in being “put through hell”. Click to Read Full Article on Nursing Times