NMC condemns racism against nurses on ITV’s Good Morning Britain

This abuse includes:

• A manager saying, ‘then you shouldn’t have come to the UK’ to an RCN member
• A member of staff telling an RCN member, ‘I want to remind you that you’re not one of us’
• A patient and their family repeatedly refusing care from an RCN member, saying they didn’t want ‘people like her’ treating their family and calling the member and their colleagues ‘slaves’.

Paul told the programme that we have reached ‘crisis point’ – with some Black, Asian and minority ethnic registrants seeing the situation as being worse now than at any time in the last 30 years.

The whole health and care sector needs to take a zero-tolerance approach. For our part at the NMC:

• We have signed the Unison Anti-Racism Charter
• We have pledged to de-bias our regulatory processes – and to eliminate disproportionate Fitness to Practise referrals received from employers in relation to ethnicity – by 2030
• We have increased ethnic diversity among panel members who decide on Fitness to Practise hearings involving nurses, midwives and nursing associates – 24 percent of lay panel members and 23 percent of registrant panel members are now from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds, respectively.

Other recent news…