St George Hospital in London and history of discrimination against women and people of color
I have recently been watching a very good show called 24 Hours in A&E (Accident and Emergency) a British medical documentary programme of St George Hospital in London. I notice there were no black doctors or even nurses on the show so far, and even the patients whose stories they tell (usually 3 different people per episode), none of them were black either. So I looked it up on Google and found a doctor's story of racism at the hospital.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_in_A%26E
I think America, at least the cities, do better with having black doctors and nurses.
Here is one doctor's blog about working at St George Hospital. Here are some excerpts.
By Dr Joe Collier (white)
https://joecollier.blog/2020/11/21/a-racist-episode-a-necessary-reminder/
The story actually starts in 1982 when a computer programme was introduced to help senior staff members process application forms from students who wished to come and study at the School. The process was seen as time-consuming, and by using the programme, which replicated decisions the staff had made in the past, things might be easier.
At this time I knew nothing of the computer programme, but leading up to November 1986 I wrote several letters to the then Dean – Richard West – asking how students were selected. I was worried about discrimination and was particularly interested to discover the origins and implication of a handwritten number on each student’s application form which I would see at the time of their interview. Somehow I knew it was a score which had determined whether the student would be asked to attend.
The breakthrough in November 1986 came out of the blue. By chance I walked past the open door of an office where William Evans (a junior administrator) was actually using the computer programme to process student application forms. When I was invited in I noticed on the screen questions relating to an applicant’s gender and ethnicity. William was half way through a particular application and I asked him to make the applicant ‘male/Caucasian’ and with this adjustment appeared an eligibility-for-interview score of ‘19’. Then I asked that the same candidate be made ‘female/non Caucasian’ and the score switched to ‘37’. William then told me how, on these rankings, candidate 1, the ‘white male’, would be called for interview, while candidate 2, the ‘black female’ rejected. He also told me how, in calculating the eligibility score the programme was weighted much more heavily against ‘non Caucasian’ students than against women.
For many years I had worked on race issues with Dr Aggrey Burke, a close St George’s colleague whose work on racism is renowned.
After making contact with the Equal Opportunities Commission, it was the Commission for Racial Equality that undertook an Inquiry into the episode. In their conclusion they found that the School, through the operation of its computer programme to select students, was guilty of systematic racial discrimination.
The illustration shows a photo of the logo of St George’s, University of London. It is interesting to note that the saint himself was from a minority ethnic group. (His father was Turkish and his mother was Palestinian).
(Aggrey Washington Burke FRCPsych (born 1943) is a British retired psychiatrist and academic, born in Jamaica, who spent the majority of his medical career at St George's Hospital in London, UK, specialising in transcultural psychiatry and writing literature on changing attitudes towards black people and mental health. He has carried out extensive research on racism and mental illness and is the first black consultant psychiatrist appointed by Britain's National Health Service (NHS).)