The diversity industry is bad for your health

It’s ‘our’ NHS, we are repeatedly told. Britain’s ‘best loved’ institution, apparently. Yet more evidence has emerged this week to show that its ability to provide the patient care we expect is being undermined by its obsession with diversity.

UK health secretary Wes Streeting complained earlier this month that there are ‘some really daft things being done in the name of equality, diversity and inclusion’ (EDI). There is also now a mountain of evidence showing that workplace EDI interventions are not only ineffective at increasing racial diversity in the workplace – they may also, in some instances, actually be counterproductive and encourage racial tensions. Yet it seems that woke training schemes and awareness-raising exercises are so thoroughly embedded in the lifeblood of our health system that a huge effort will be needed to flush them out.

First up was news, reported in The Times last week, that the NHS is still actively recruiting ‘equality and diversity staff’. What’s more, these woke hires are in line to be paid double the salary of junior doctors. NHS England is currently looking to fill an EDI secondment position for south-west England. With a salary of £122,000 pro rata per year, I’m guessing this opportunity will not remain unfilled for long. Elsewhere, a London trust is advertising a head of EDI position with a £91,300 salary. With junior doctors earning between £36,600 and £70,400 and consultants being paid between £105,500 to £139,900 per year, why bother attending medical school?

Unsurprisingly, the NHS Confederation, which represents managers across the health service, is keen to contextualise these costs. ‘Current estimates put NHS annual spending on dedicated EDI roles in the range of £40million’, a defensive webpage claims. ‘This accounts for less than 0.03 per cent of the NHS’s annual resource budget for 2023-2024.’ In other words, when your annual budget is more than the entire GDP of many countries, £40million on EDI officers is just loose change. But patients who have suffered the indignity of being treated in a hospital corridor, or have spent days failing to secure an appointment with a doctor, may be forgiven for thinking that £40million could be better spent on medical staff.

The harm caused to patients by the NHS’s diversity obsession is not just in wasted money. When clinicians attend lengthy EDI training sessions, time that could be spent in hospital is instead spent watching PowerPoint presentations. The Times highlights an 18-hour long NHS leadership academy course, which takes place over six weeks and helps senior managers ‘lead with inclusion and allyship’ by reflecting on their privilege, and studying ‘the history of British slavery and colonialism’. Elsewhere, staff can engage with a 49-slide ‘microaggressions toolkit’, a 24-slide toolkit on how to be ‘an ally’ or spend up to 60 hours taking a course on ‘inclusive workplaces’. Next time you can’t get to see a doctor, rest assured she is probably busy learning that slavery was bad and that calling people ‘ladies and gentlemen’ is evil.

Ironically, diversity training does not engender compassion and consideration towards female NHS staff. Quite the opposite. Nurses in Darlington and Sandie Peggie in Scotland are having to take their NHS trusts to court for their right to have single-sex changing rooms. It is precisely because EDI officers have aggressively pushed the biologically nonsensical view that gender is not binary, but something people ‘self-describe’, that women have been made to change alongside males who use the workplace to roleplay their fantasies.

Meanwhile, as the Sunday Telegraph revealed last week, EDI targets are now central to the management of the health service. Thirty NHS Trusts, the units that oversee a geographical area or specialised aspect of healthcare, have signed up to an anti-racism awards scheme that requires them to have a minimum number of ‘black, Asian and minority-ethnic’ (BAME) members on their board of directors. To win a silver medal, a trust must show that all managers and senior clinical staff have a personal EDI-development plan agreed and an executive director who attends BAME staff network meetings at least four times a year. This is yet another scheme that involves removing clinical staff from GP’s surgeries and hospital wards and putting them in lecture theatres to hear sermons about race.

I don’t know about anyone else, but if I am sick I want my doctor to be free to see me, not off learning about white privilege. I want a doctor well-versed in anatomy, not educated in gender identity. I want £40million to be spent on doctors and nurses, so I can get an appointment more quickly, rather than providing fat salaries for EDI officers. And I want hard-working female nurses to be treated with the respect they deserve, not degraded by being made to change alongside men.

It’s all well and good for Wes Streeting to tut at the ‘daft things’ being done in the name of diversity and inclusion, but rooting all this nonsense out of the NHS is a serious and urgent challenge.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.