The NHS is still in thrall to the cult of diversity

The NHS is in dire straits. People struggle to get doctors’ appointments, face unbearable waits for an ambulance and encounter interminable delays for routine operations. Yet despite the all too palpable crisis in frontline patient care, it seems NHS management is still happy to waste time and money promoting woke values to Britain’s largest workforce.

According to a job advert published last month, Derbyshire NHS Foundation Trust is looking to recruit a new ‘Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ at Kingsway Hospital. On a generous salary of £70,000 to £80,000 a year, the EDI head will be expected to help Kingsway Hospital realise its ‘strategic ambitions’ and ‘continue to develop a culture of belonging, equity and cultural improvement’. Lest anyone think that 80 grand a year might be better spent on a nurse or doctor, Kingsway’s EDI head will also be responsible for providing ‘constructive’ challenges and speaking ‘truth to power’. Which I’m sure will be music to the ears of someone waiting months for a hip replacement.

The Kingsway job is no one-off. Incredible as it may seem, the NHS spends an estimated £40million a year on dedicated EDI roles. These highly paid ideologues busy themselves with tasks such as compiling an ‘A to Z of Diversity’ to instruct staff on how ‘white women can be actionable allies to people of colour’, offering training courses on ‘noticing and challenging microaggressions’ and organising ‘LGBT-themed ‘tea and rainbow cake’ picnics.

Of course, £40million is chump change when compared with the whole of the NHS’s £182 billion budget. Scrapping every diversity role would only claw back enough money to cover 2 hours of NHS spending per year. Nevertheless, it is absurd for the health service to spend a single penny on diversity initiatives at a time when it is failing to deliver on its basic responsibilities. As of June this year, a whopping 6.3million patients are waiting for treatment. Overcrowding in hospitals is so bad that Labour MP Jess Phillips recently described the situation as ‘akin to a warzone’. So why are NHS bureaucrats still so hellbent on pushing identity politics on to their staff, wasting their time and our money in the process?

It seems that no matter how poor the provision of healthcare gets, the NHS will always find resources for EDI initiatives. We need to stand up to these warped priorities.

Rosie Norman is an intern at spiked.