A black South African nurse, working at an immigrant removal centre at Heathrow, was awarded £25 000 after suing the National Health Service (NHS) for racial abuse and winning her case for race-related harassment and victimisation.
Adelaide Kweyama, who had worked as an agency nurse, reported that a patient had racially abused her in February 2019, and that she later also overheard the senior nurse telling a colleague she was “tired of people coming to work saying they are not well and that Ms Kweyama should go and bleach her skin”.
Kweyama told the tribunal she was also previously racially abused by a group of male detainees, reports the Cape Argus.
An employment judge criticised NHS bosses’ response to the incident, describing it as an “absolute abdication of the positive responsibility on managers”.
The tribunal found that on 9 February 2019, Kweyama was told by a colleague: “You need to get a pool of bleach and bleach your skin so that you come back tomorrow white and the patients will be nice to you.”
On 10 February, the same nurse was overheard saying: “I do not care, let her bleach her skin, I am sick and tired of people coming to work and saying they are not well.”
The NHS also tried to deduct money from her salary and a judge initially dismissed her claim of “unauthorised deduction from wages”, saying the complaint of direct race discrimination was not well founded.
Kweyama said: “The whole incident was handled atrociously. I was born black. I will live black and I will die black – what is wrong with being black?”
She said she felt insulted, discriminated against, bullied, harassed and abused. “I was dehumanised.”
Cape Argus PressReader article – SA nurse’s big pay day in UK for racial slurs (Open access)
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