A new interactive resource has been published to support nurses to have conversations about racism in the workplace.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and NHS England have partnered to develop the resource Taking Time to Talk: Advancing Race Equity in Nursing and Midwifery.
“This is an important part of the work to help our members and anybody using the resource to ensure that their own practice and behaviour mirrors the values of nursing”
Wendy Irwin
It focuses on conversations that nurses can have to push towards race equity across all health and social care settings in the UK.
The resource covers microaggressions, psychological safety and allyship, as well as actions that all nurses can take to promote race equity and how to speak up and get help.
Wendy Irwin, RCN diversity and equalities co-ordinator, told Nursing Times that the resource should be used by all nurses.
“It’s not just something that is only for Black and minoritised or global majority staff, it’s going to be for everybody,” she said.
“We felt that it was important for us to begin to have conversations about race, because we need to hasten the pace for change, and we need to be able to really do justice to this work.
“Without the ability to talk about it, it’s then very hard to do anything about the things that people are facing – the everyday inequality as well as the kind of big stuff that people are facing every day.”
A Nursing Times investigation, published in June this year, showed that racism against NHS staff was getting worse every year.
It found that nurses were subject to physical or verbal abuse by patients and were also subjected to more covert racism by managers, such as being denied promotions or development opportunities.
Ms Irwin acknowledged this reality for minority ethnic nurses and called for conversations about race equity to be happening earlier and more frequently across organisations.
“For a long time, in lots of organisations, conversations about race were probably something that might be discussed in specific training courses or as a result of complaints at board level,” she explained.
“To create change, [it] needs to be the result of a conversation that happens where people actually share some lived experience and then, from that conversation, are able to agree what they might do differently.”
Wendy Irwin
Ms Irwin noted that the Nursing and Midwifery Council code of conduct states that nurses must act with “honesty and integrity”, and treat people fairly and without discrimination, bullying or harassment.
She added: “Having conversations about race is never easy, and it’s really easy to find ways to not have the conversation.
“So this is an important part of the work to help our members and anybody using the resource to ensure that their own practice and behaviour mirrors the values of nursing.”
Ms Irwin noted that the resource ties into a larger piece of work that the RCN is undertaking around becoming an anti-discriminatory and anti-racist organisation.
Earlier this year, the college launched its five-year equality, diversity and inclusion strategy.
This formed part of the RCN’s commitments to improve its culture, which were made after reports by Bruce Carr KC and KPMG in 2022 highlighted serious shortcomings at the college.
Ms Irwin said: “Since that time, we’ve been getting to talk to [nurses] about what that works need to look like, and getting the organisation ready to do that work. “So this is an output from that piece of work.”
She added that the resource would inevitably change as the anti-racism work at the RCN progresses.
“This will be something that we’re looking to update on a regular basis, but we needed to give members some tools, some things they could start, to start to have the conversation in their own workplaces,” she said.
