NHS staff still receive disproportionate amounts of bullying and harassment

It is a new year and new decade, but some NHS staff still receive disproportionate amounts of bullying and harassment from staff and service users

The National Health Service gives priority to patient safety and well-being, and their right to be treated with dignity and respect, as it should. But health care staff also deserve to be treated with respect, and are not always. A new Better Health briefing paper published by the Race Equality Foundation draws attention to the worrying impact of bullying and racial harassment on black and minority ethnic staff in the NHS. The briefing paper summarized literature on the subject and found that black and minority ethnic NHS staff experience higher levels of bullying and harassment than their white majority ethnic colleagues. The bullying and harassment from patients experienced by Black African staff and staff of mixed ethnic backgrounds is higher than for other groups; and for Bangladeshi staff is higher from NHS colleagues. The author, Laia Becares, a researcher at UCL, points out one study that found that just over half of black and minority ethnic nurses’ employers knew about the incidents, compared to two-thirds of white nurses’ employers. Under-reporting is therefore a problem. Many bullying and harassment policies do not explicitly include racial harassment, leaving Third Sector organisations to fill the gap. The paper points to the role of black and minority ethnic staff networks in providing support, and the importance of increasing the reporting of incidents.
You can view Experiences of bullying and racial harassment among minority ethnic staff in the NHS by Laia Becares at: http://www.raceequalityfoundation.org.uk/health/files/health- brief14.pdf