‘The NHS would collapse within hours’: BME staff say Britain fails to appreciate their roles

Key Highlights

• I know I am Black.
• I was born Black.
• And I love being Black.
• So tell me something I don’t know.”Those words, uttered 50 years ago as a young nurse facing regular racial abuse from patients on a London hospital ward, were a turning point in Allyson Williams’s life and career. Williams had come to the UK in 1969 from the anglophile culture of the postwar Caribbean – where children of all ethnicities learned English literature, grammar and history by heart – only to be attacked in “the mother country”. She is now among those who, having dedicated their lives to the NHS, fear the UK still does not properly appreciate the outsize contribution made to UK healthcare by Black, ethnic minority and overseas-born or trained staff – decades after Windrush generation nurses held up the service in its earliest years. Those professionals included Deloris James, who was born a British citizen in St Kitts and Nevis and moved to Cardiff as 10-year-old in 1964.
• She was “pushed” into a career in the NHS, following after her mother who was a midwife – 12 other relatives also worked in the health service. Williams in uniform during her nurse’s training at Whittington hospital in Highgate, north London.