Black and Asian radiographers are facing growing racist abuse from patients, including being called “monkeys” and “dirty foreigners” and being refused on the basis of their skin colour.
A survey of 381 members of the Society of Radiographers found a “noticeable” rise in overt racism experienced or witnessed by staff across the NHS over the past 18 months.
Patients complained about the skin colour of the workers treating them and repeated claims about “people coming over here and taking our jobs”. One patient mocked a radiographer’s headscarf and claimed not to understand her, despite her speaking with a mild Yorkshire accent. Another refused to be treated by a black radiographer, saying: “Black people frighten me.”
This abuse doesn’t appear from nowhere. For years, the British ruling class and its press have blamed migrants for the damage caused by capitalism. Falling living standards, collapsing public services, insecure housing and overstretched hospitals are all presented as the fault of foreigners rather than the result of decades of privatisation, austerity and attacks on the working class.
The racism directed at NHS staff is one predictable result.
Paul Awah, a radiographer based in Bedfordshire who moved to Britain from Nigeria five years ago, said patients regularly pretend not to understand him even though English is his first language.
“Sometimes no matter how clear you’re speaking to a particular patient, a white patient, independent of whether the patient is sick or not, they just pretend not to understand,” he said.
“They seem to understand people speaking with an Irish or a Scottish accent, but they claim to not understand me even though I am speaking clearly. Some patients also assume that we are not qualified.”
The issue clearly isn’t whether patients can understand Awah. His accent is being treated as evidence that he doesn’t belong, while his qualifications and competence are questioned because he’s African.
Britain’s dependence on migrant healthcare workers is itself rooted in imperialism. For centuries, Britain extracted wealth, labour and resources from colonised and oppressed countries while preventing their independent development. Today, the British state continues to benefit from workers trained in countries whose health services are often far more desperately understaffed.
The NHS couldn’t operate without workers from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Yet the same political system that depends on their labour encourages the public to see them as intruders.
The chief executive of the NHS Race and Health Observatory, Prof Habib Naqvi, described the reported incidents as a “sobering reminder of the racism, prejudice and hatred that persist in our society, and of the profound impact they have on healthcare staff and the communities they serve”.
“They create real fear, trauma and anxiety among our diverse workforce, who continue to provide diligent, compassionate care to patients at some of the most vulnerable moments in their lives,” he said.
“The NHS could not function without the skill, dedication and compassion of healthcare workers from across the world. We strongly condemn these reported racist incidents, and there must be a clear, consistently enforced zero-tolerance approach across the NHS, including in cases where patients display racist or otherwise unacceptable conduct.”
Racist patients should face consequences, and healthcare workers mustn’t be expected to quietly tolerate abuse as part of their jobs. But workplace policies alone can’t explain or stop the growth of racism.
Awah pointed directly to the political climate created by the far right and the wider anti-migrant consensus.
“What used to be something people wouldn’t say, now the rhetoric has changed,” he said.
“Immigrants are blamed for the cost of living, energy bills, the worsening situation in the country, and people feel it’s okay to say it.”
This scapegoating extends far beyond openly fascist organisations. Conservative and Labour politicians compete to prove who can be toughest on migrants, while newspapers owned by billionaires flood the country with stories presenting migration as a threat.
The purpose of this propaganda is to hide the real division in society. The basic conflict isn’t between British-born and migrant workers. It’s between the capitalist class, which owns the banks, businesses, property and media, and the working class whose labour produces society’s wealth.
A migrant nurse doesn’t set rents. An African radiographer doesn’t privatise public services. An Asian care worker doesn’t hold down wages or raise energy bills. These decisions are made by landlords, corporations, investors and the politicians who represent them.
Racism redirects anger away from those responsible and towards other workers. It encourages a British worker whose hospital is understaffed to abuse the migrant worker keeping it open. It tells people impoverished by capitalism that their enemy is another person struggling under the same system.
This is why racism has always been useful to the ruling class. It divides workers, weakens solidarity and makes collective resistance more difficult. The worker who believes migrants are stealing their job is less likely to join with migrant workers to demand better wages, safer conditions and properly funded services.
The Society of Radiographers’ findings reflect a wider pattern. The Royal College of Nursing reported in October that racist incidents experienced by its members had risen by 55 percent over three years. The latest NHS staff survey found that one in five black and minority-ethnic staff had experienced abuse, bullying or harassment from patients or the public, compared with one in 20 white staff.
NHS England said its new national staff standards require organisations to prevent and respond to racism and allow care to be refused to abusive patients in non-emergency situations. Staff must be protected, and nobody has an automatic right to racially abuse a worker without consequences.
But the same British state issuing these workplace standards continues to detain migrants, deport refugees and treat people fleeing countries devastated by war, sanctions and imperialist exploitation as an invading force.
It condemns racist abuse inside hospitals while reproducing the political ideas that encourage it outside them.
Fighting racism in the NHS therefore means more than disciplining individual patients. It requires a struggle against the capitalist system that produces insecurity, turns workers against one another and uses racism to conceal the source of their suffering.
Every worker, regardless of where they were born, has the same interest in defeating that system. Racism serves the bosses. Solidarity is the weapon of the working class.
