Together we can challenge the racism that persists in healthcare
Four years on from the founding of the NHS Race and Health Observatory, Habib Naqvi looks back on the progress made and warns us not to be complacent Five years ago, The BMJ led a national conversation in its Racism in Medicine issue.1 It shone a much needed light on the deeply entrenched biases in our healthcare services and the structural inequities that drive them. In the wake of that conversation, we founded the NHS Race and Health Observatory, an organisation with the mission of identifying racial inequity in healthcare and pressing the NHS and the government to meaningfully tackle it. This means looking not just at the harms of racism in healthcare, but also to the inequities that have persisted for centuries. The fight against racism is often a fight against the status quo, and we need unified anti-racist action to overcome it. In 2020, black, Asian, and ethnic minority people were dying disproportionately from covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement spurred a global conver
