\u201cI am fed up of being called names. I know I am Black. I was born Black. And I love being Black. So tell me something I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those words, uttered 50 years ago as a young nurse facing regular racial abuse from patients on a London hospital ward, were a turning point in Allyson Williams\u2019s life and career.<\/p>\n
Williams had come to the UK in 1969 from the anglophile culture of the postwar Caribbean \u2013 where children of all ethnicities learned English literature, grammar and history by heart \u2013 only to be attacked in \u201cthe mother country\u201d.<\/p>\n
She is now among those who, having dedicated their lives to the NHS<\/a>, fear the UK still does not properly appreciate the outsize contribution made to UK healthcare by Black, ethnic minority and overseas-born or trained staff \u2013 decades after Windrush generation nurses held up the service in its earliest years.<\/p>\n Those professionals included Deloris James, who was born a British citizen in St Kitts and Nevis and moved to Cardiff as 10-year-old in 1964. She was \u201cpushed\u201d into a career in the NHS, following after her mother who was a midwife \u2013 12 other relatives also worked in the health service.<\/p>\n Williams in uniform during her nurse\u2019s training at Whittington hospital in Highgate, north London. Photograph: Martin Godwin\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cThe stories I hear, it seems as if things have got worse than when I was in the NHS,\u201d said James, 71, who worked as a nurse and midwife. \u201cI\u2019m not saying there wasn\u2019t racism, but it seems so much more prevalent.\u201d<\/p>\n The number of overseas nurses and midwives coming to the UK is collapsing<\/a>, with rising racism and changes to immigration rules blamed for the fall. In an interview with the Guardian, the chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, Jeanette Dickson, said the NHS was being put at risk because foreign health professionals increasingly saw the UK as an \u201cunwelcoming, racist\u201d country.<\/p>\n Between April and September, 6,321 nurses and midwives from abroad joined the register of those licensed to practise in the UK, compared with 12,534 who did so in the same period in 2024. In October, the Royal College of Nursing revealed the number of reports by nurses of racist incidents at work had risen by 55% over three years.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, overseas-trained doctors are leaving the UK in record numbers<\/a>, with 4,880 doctors who qualified in another country leaving the UK during 2024, a rise of 26% on the 3,869 who did so the year before, according to the General Medical Council.<\/p>\n Williams, a writer who came to the UK in 1969 and spent 40 years in the NHS as a nurse, midwife, manager and clinical leader, said: \u201cIt\u2019s been over 50 years and nobody has learned any lessons. Nobody has seen fit to congratulate or to thank the multi-ethnic people who have come \u2013 in our generation to \u2018rebuild the country\u2019, that was how it was put to us.<\/p>\n \u201cI came at a time of brain drain when so many English people had gone to Canada and America and Australia. When I got into the hospital, and in my class, there were 30 girls who were training. One was English, four Irish and the rest were West Indians and west African \u2013 of the West Indians, there were 14 of us from Trinidad alone.<\/p>\n \u201cThe training and the social life was amazing, but there was a lot of racism from the patients. They would slap you or hit you or push you away. I was called the \u2018N\u2019 word. I was told I was nasty. It was quite disturbing.\u201d<\/p>\n After a year, Williams told her mother \u201cshe couldn\u2019t take it any more\u201d, that she felt as if she was \u201cwalking on glass\u201d.<\/p>\n But her mother told her: \u201cYou have a dream. You have wanted to be a nurse since you were small. The racism is their problem. You just get on with your career and find a way to deal with them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt actually led me to make that big stand on the ward,\u201d Williams, who celebrated the moment in the title of her autobiography, Tell Me Something I Don\u2019t Know<\/a>, said. \u201cI don\u2019t know where it came from \u2026 it was the most empowering statement I\u2019ve ever made \u2013 from that point on, [racism] just never bothered me.\u201d<\/p>\n Williams would move on to midwifery, where there was much less racism and where she found \u201cbringing life into the world was such a privilege\u201d.<\/p>\n She said: \u201cEvery now and then you would get a woman saying she doesn\u2019t want to have a Black midwife. But the managers then were very strict. They would say \u2018they\u2019re all we have and they\u2019re the best \u2013 you either have a Black midwife or you pack up and you go somewhere else\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Williams during her time as a midwife, writing up notes after a home birth at a mother\u2019s home. Photograph: Martin Godwin\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Decades on, and not every Black, ethnic minority, or overseas-born or trained medic feels they can rely on colleagues for support.<\/p>\n The NHS\u2019s most recent workforce race equality standard report<\/a> revealed Black or minority ethnic (BME) women (15.6%) were most likely to have experienced discrimination from other staff in the last 12 months, and 51% of NHS trusts reported BME staff were over 1.25 times more likely than white staff to enter formal disciplinary processes. At 80% of NHS trusts, white applicants were significantly more likely than BME applicants to be appointed from shortlisting.<\/p>\n Alison Hewitt is the second generation of her family to devote her working life to the NHS. Her aunt was a Windrush generation nurse and her mother was a children\u2019s nurse \u2013 but Hewitt broke the mould to train in radiography 35 years ago, when Black radiographers were a rarity.<\/p>\n She said: \u201cI think a lot of the Windrush nurses kept their mouth shut. Whereas nowadays, you\u2019re constantly battling HR.\u201d<\/p>\n But despite the discrimination and disparities, 28.6% of staff in NHS trusts are Black or minority ethnic and about 20% non-UK nationals.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s at least 27 countries represented where I work,\u201d Hewitt said. \u201cIf the Black staff, the Asian staff and the foreign-born staff all went home, the NHS would collapse within hours. We\u2019ve always been brought in to do the difficult work.\u201d<\/p>\n Nonetheless, Hewitt believes that if anything is driving turnover of staff in the NHS, it is \u201ceconomic betterment\u201d \u2013 and Williams agrees.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere do you go in the world where there is no racism?\u201d Williams said. \u201cIt\u2019s a global, international problem. But what you might find [outside the UK] is that the wages are better or there\u2019s something else to compensate for it.\u201d<\/p>\n Saada Maida, a 41-year-old gynaecologist from Leamington Spa who came to the UK as a refugee from Syria, said NHS staff of all backgrounds shared the common challenge of coping with patients with diverse needs in a \u201csystematically underfunded\u201d system, but stressed he had been made to feel welcome \u2013 and felt \u201cthe UK is one of the least racist nations\u201d.<\/p>\n He added: \u201cThe common denominator between these people leaving is feeling somehow that they\u2019re not appreciated in the NHS \u2013 if you take a contract in the Gulf, we know it\u2019s systematically full of inequalities, more so than the UK, but the pay is better. I think all doctors or healthcare professionals leaving the NHS, I think the incentive, whether they admit it or not, is to a great extent financial.\u201d<\/p>\n Having seen so many members of her family devote their lives to the NHS, James worries that the service she knew will be lost to cuts<\/a> and privatisation<\/a>, as well as the pressures facing its \u201cwonderful\u201d staff.<\/p>\n \u201cIt makes me feel very sad,\u201d James added. \u201cHere we are again, back to the 50s, when people were invited to come to Britain to work and rebuild and, when they do arrive, then they face these hostilities.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI am fed up of being called names. I know I am Black. I was born Black. And…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":656525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-656524","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-northern-ireland","14":"tag-scotland","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115787744117723951","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/656525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}