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How Young Black Nurses Are Navigating NHS Racism

The NHS has been floundering before our eyes for some time now, thanks to backdoor privatisation, mounting budget cuts and increasingly impossible working conditions for the hundreds of thousands of people who work every day to keep it afloat.

Of the many shortfalls that our coveted health service has suffered, however, there are under-reported and worrying aspects of the NHS that pre-date some of the politically-imposed sanctions it has faced in recent years. And along a similar vein, professions within the NHS that have more or less been overlooked.

In nursing, for example, thousands of people leave the profession each year, with more nurses leaving the NHS in 2017, than those who joined. And more recently, it was revealed that nine out of 10 NHS trusts have a gender pay gap, with issues in nursing in particular attributed to the “inequality of opportunity” in the nursing profession, according to a Royal College of Nursing national officer, Nicola Lee.