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Black nurse told to bleach her skin wins £26,000 for racial harassment

Nurse became depressed after being told by her boss to bleach her skin to look white so ‘patients will be nice to you’
A female black nurse sitting with her back against a wall with knees raised, leaning forward and resting her head against her arms to indicate sadness or depression

Nurse became depressed after being told by her boss to bleach her skin to look white so ‘patients will be nice to you’

A female black nurse sitting with her back against a wall with knees raised, leaning forward and resting her head against her arms to indicate sadness or depression
Picture: Shutterstock

A black nurse who was told to bleach her skin to look whiter so that ‘patients will be nice to you’ has been awarded nearly £26,000 in compensation.

Adelaide Kweyama won a racial harassment claim against Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust after her boss made the suggestion.

An employment tribunal heard that Ms Kweyama was subjected to ‘loud racist chanting’ while working as an agency nurse in a removal centre for immigration detainees at Heathrow airport in 2019. There were some 600 male detainees at the centre.

The tribunal was told that on 9 February, 2019, Ms Kweyama, originally from South Africa, was triaging a detainee who had racially abused her and was pretending not to speak or understand English.

When she reported the incident to the nurse in charge and suggested the patient might not have wanted to be triaged by a black nurse, she was told by her supervisor to ‘get in a pool of bleach to bleach your skin so that you come back tomorrow white, and the patient will be nice to you’.

Tribunal finds ‘abdication of the positive responsibility on managers’ after the incident

Ms Kweyama raised a report on the Datix system about the incident but claimed there had been no follow-up, despite the trust saying action had been taken, the tribunal heard.

The judge criticised trust bosses for their approach as an ‘absolute abdication of the positive responsibility on managers’.

In a separate incident in January 2019 Ms Kweyama described being called a ‘n****r’ and ‘monkey’ by a group of detainees who she had asked to see individually for their medication. She told the hearing: ‘[They] started making monkey noises and dog noises, demanding to come in at the same time.’

The tribunal heard she declined to complete incident forms saying it was something staff ‘put up with all the time’, but did raise another Datix.

Trust says it has apologised and is working to combat racism

After the February 2019 incident, Ms Kweyama told her agency she could not continue working at Heathrow because she was ‘very depressed’ and needed time to ‘recover psychologically and emotionally’.

Ms Kweyama told the hearing her contract with the trust was then terminated by a senior nurse manager because of concerns about her mental health.

She was awarded a total of £25,713 in damages, including £17,000 for injury to feelings caused by race-related harassment and victimisation.

A spokesperson for the trust said: ‘We have personally apologised to Ms Kweyama for this incident. It has also been used with our staff to learn from. These were not the behaviours we expect of our colleagues.

‘We feel appalled that this has happened and we will keep this to the forefront of our work to combat racism.’


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