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Black nurse told to bleach her skin receives further compensation

Nurse awarded £13,000 to cover loss of earnings, on top of original damages of almost £26,000 after being told to bleach her skin to look white ‘so patients will be nice to you’
Photo of black nurse looking depressed, illustrating story about racial harassment at work

Nurse awarded £13,000 to cover loss of earnings, on top of original damages of almost £26,000 after being told to bleach her skin to look white ‘so patients will be nice to you’

Photo of black nurse looking depressed, illustrating story about racial harassment at work
Picture: iStock

A black nurse who won a racial harassment claim against the NHS after she was told to bleach her skin to look whiter has been awarded further compensation.

Adelaide Kweyama sued Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust after her boss made the suggestion so that ‘patients will be nice to you’.

NHS trust also pays £2,000 to cover income tax on compensation

She was initially awarded £25,713 in damages, but in a fresh ruling published this week a tribunal ordered the trust to pay a further £13,375 to cover Ms Kweyama’s loss of earnings ‘caused by race-related harassment and victimisation’. The additional compensation takes the total amount awarded to £39,088.

The trust has also been told to pay an additional £2,272 to cover the income tax on the additional compensation so Ms Kweyama gets the full amount.

Nurse told to ‘come back tomorrow white’

The ruling comes after Ms Kweyama, originally from South Africa, was subjected to ‘loud racist chanting’ while working as an agency nurse in a removal centre for immigration detainees at Heathrow airport in 2019.

When she reported one particular incident of racial abuse to the nurse in charge and suggested the patient might not have wanted to be triaged by a black nurse, she was told 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’.

In a separate incident, she described being called a ‘n****r’ and ‘monkey’ by a group of detainees who she had asked to see individually for their medication.

Nurse’s contract was terminated by trust

Ms Kweyama reported feeling ‘very depressed’ after the incidents and told her agency she could not continue to work at Heathrow.

She told the original tribunal hearing that her contract with the trust was then terminated by a senior nurse manager because of concerns about her mental health.

The tribunal was also told that the trust had ‘done nothing to support’ Ms Kweyama after she had raised a report on the Datix system about the incidents.

It concluded that Ms Kweyama had been subjected to race-related harassment and victimisation, but her complaint of direct race discrimination was dismissed.

Trust says ‘we feel appalled that this has happened’

At the time, 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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