Читать книгу ABC of Clinical Resilience - Группа авторов - Страница 14

We cannot consider practitioner resilience and its relationship to patient safety without acknowledging that our lofty proclamations of equality for all is far away from the lived experience of many of our colleagues. For example, in the UK National Health Service (NHS), there is a significantly higher percentage of black, Asian, minority ethnic (BAME) workers than in the general population (21% versus 13.8%). In London, while 43% of the NHS workforce is from BAME backgrounds, they occupy only 14% of board‐level positions in local healthcare (Kings Fund, 2018).

Staff experiences include the following:

‘…patients really can be difficult. I mean, recently I had a patient who told me that I was the wrong colour to be English’

(Kings Fund, 2019)

While initiatives such as the British Medical Association’s Equality Matters campaign and the BMA Charter on Racism in Medicine have sought to address this, the extent of the problem was brought into sharper focus during the 2020 pandemic, when it emerged that the death rate among BAME healthcare workers was disproportionately higher than non‐BAME practitioners (Box 1.2). This was a tragedy set against the backdrop of a health service which would collapse without BAME staff.

There is evidence that BAME staff struggled more to obtain adequate PPE as compared to their white counterparts (Box 1.3). Nowhere was this more tragically illustrated than in the case of Abdul Mabud Choudhry (Box 1.4).