Partha Kar: NHS leaders must be honest about failures to confront racism in the workforce
It’s remarkable how the narrative on tackling racism in the medical workforce has changed in recent years. In 2019-20 there seemed to be a genuine appetite to tackle the scourge of racism in the NHS workforce, with a new director for people and communities at NHS England1 and a specific lead for the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES). Datasets were made publicly available, and strategies were created to investigate why this protected characteristic always shows the worst outcomes in annual staff surveys.2 In 2020 The BMJ published a special issue focused on the culture of racism in the NHS workforce—but there’s been little, if any, progress.3 Five years on, there’s a feeling that racism is being dismissed. Race equality week came and went recently without a word from NHS leaders. Relevant social media accounts were mostly confined to reposting about problems related to policy, while disregarding the actual issue …
