Two frontline NHS doctors explain why racism at the heart of British institutions must be called out and eradicated to stop any more unnecessary deaths of minorities
All our phrasing – race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy – serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘Between the World and Me‘
“They died like true men, at their posts, in the quiet performance of their duty, as little allured by the prospects of reward as they were deterred by the fear of danger.” This is how the Glasgow Herald described the deaths of five young doctors in Greenock during the typhus epidemic of 1864-65. Plus ça change.
More than 200 healthcare workers have died in the UK with the Coronavirus. To put that into perspective, more doctors, nurses and care workers have died in the past two months than British soldiers during nine years of operations in Iraq.
During this pandemic, we have become numb to the daily onslaught of deaths. The Government has performed mental gymnastics at daily briefings. All the while, doctors, nurses and care workers have died, many of them passing away at their own place of work.
There is an obvious disconnect between this Government and its scientific advisors, but there is also an emotional chasm between our leaders and our frontline healthcare workers.
Those of us on the frontline have experienced the trauma, grief and suffering of our patients. We have tried to ease it. The reality of this grief has not been reflected in the Government’s triumphant takes on testing or maddening insistence that we threw a ‘protective ring’ around care homes. According to the Government’s own statistics, 40% of care homes have suffered from outbreaks of the Coronavirus.
We started raising concerns, but were batted away by the Government. As our colleagues fell ill and died, we were told that there were no shortages of personal protective equipment, and that we needed to have an “adult conversation about PPE”. As doctors, our humanity was disregarded.
The question that we want to ask Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock is simple: how many dead healthcare workers is an acceptable number to you?
The government’s failure to protect healthcare workers has not just been an abject failure, but one that should be viewed in history books as negligence. We want future ministers to look back on this Government and ask how they ever allowed our protectors to go unprotected.
Many theories have circulated regarding why healthcare workers have died. It is telling that none of the deceased staff are from ITU wards – the places with the most complete levels of PPE.
Families of dead doctors and nurses trusted the Government to protect them. A growing frustration surrounding a lack of transparency has not helped to quell tensions, particularly with regards to black and ethnic minority healthcare workers.
Publication of a Public Health England report into the risk factors associated with COVID-19 – including the role of ethnicity – was apparently delayed because the Government was worried about stoking racial tensions. Worse still, there were no recommendations offered and it has been suggested that Hancock’s team censored part of the document.
If the Government does not want to stoke racial tensions, it should not withhold a report into racial disparity under the guise of not wanting to stoke racial tensions. By apparently doing so, it implied that an entire community does not have the collective emotional intelligence to handle its outcomes. It is a perfect snapshot of Martin Luther King Jr’s famous words on the “white moderate who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom”.
While 20% of the NHS workforce is BAME, just 7% of NHS leaders are from BAME backgrounds. Meanwhile, more than 50% of healthcare workers who have died with the Coronavirus are from BAME backgrounds. A black man is four times more likely than a white man to die with the virus. During this pandemic, more Filipino healthcare workers have died with the Coronavirus in the