The NHS is sick with wokery

The National Health Service, bloated and inept, doesn’t help itself does it?

According to the Mail on Sunday, the NHS blows approximately £40million annually on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) positions. These are incredibly well-paying jobs for staff members who seem to do very little. This usually takes the form of lecturing non-BAME (black, Asian and minority-ethnic) staff on things like ‘unconscious bias’ or organising some kind of awareness month. Worse, the small impact these jobs do have is almost entirely negative.

Some of the salaries are eye-watering. According to the MoS, NHS headhunters are seeking an associate dean for equality, diversity and inclusion in south-west England, who will be paid £122,000. A similar job, this time at the Gloucestershire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation, will pay a salary of £68,000 for a candidate with a ‘broad and deep understanding of the barriers of change, prejudice and unconscious bias’.

These aren’t only far higher sums than what most hardworking, productive members of society earn – it is well over double what junior doctors are paid, and triple or four times more than a nurse. It sometimes looks as if the NHS puts more value on recruiting DEI staff than on frontline doctors and nurses.

Unsurprisingly, given the endemic incompetence that has long plagued the NHS, DEI officers can’t even seem to perform their pointless jobs properly. Far from being an ‘inclusive’ workplace, the NHS currently seems to be rife with racism. Or at least one form of racism in particular. Indeed, since Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October 2023, complaints have been made against 123 doctors for anti-Semitism. Yet where a zero-tolerance approach is taken to doctors who, say, believe in single-sex spaces (or what the NHS calls ‘transphobia’), anti-Semitism seems to get a free pass. The glacial pace with which the NHS responds to allegations of Jew hate has so incensed UK health secretary Wes Streeting that he has vowed a major regulatory overhaul.

Then there’s the NHS’s sexism problem, most vividly illustrated by its persecution of Sandie Peggie. In 2024, Peggie, a Scottish nurse, was suspended because she refused to share a changing room with a male doctor who ‘identified’ as a woman. Her employer, NHS Fife, proceeded to spend more than £300,000 in tribunal hearings against Peggie. She was finally cleared of any wrongdoing in July and a tribunal will rule next week on whether she faced discrimination as a result of her sex.

The case of the Darlington nurses is even more disturbing. When eight nurses refused to change in front of a man, the nurses were told by the hospital to ‘broaden their mindset’ and ordered to undergo ‘reeducation’. Incredibly, it has now emerged that the four nurses who spoke to the media about their ordeal could face a misconduct probe. This blatant sexism and erosion of women’s rights is not some oversight. It is a direct product of DEI and the fanatical trans activism that it has institutionalised in the NHS.

Now, some people might be prepared to look past the NHS’s strange obsession with diversity if the health service were also treating the ill and injured effectively and efficiently. But it’s not. Waiting lists remain stubbornly long. Ambulances can take hours to arrive for emergencies. And GP appointments are like gold dust.

At points, the NHS’s problems stray beyond institutional decrepitude into potential criminal negligence. Nottingham University Hospitals Trust is currently the subject of a corporate-manslaughter probe over the death of hundreds of babies at two of its hospitals. Last month, a stroke unit in Blackpool had its sixth member of staff jailed. The Victoria Hospital is currently the subject of a ‘major investigation’ by Lancashire Police, according to local media. So far, the offences have ranged from sexual assault to unlawfully drugging and assaulting patients.

When the NHS is failing so badly, its indulgence of DEI can no longer be dismissed as a trivial ‘culture war’ issue. At best, the diversity agenda is an extraordinary waste of scarce money and a distraction from the health service’s core mission. At worst, it is actively inflaming bigotry and prejudice, harming staff and patients alike. The sickness in the NHS may well be incurable.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.