SA nurse ‘told to bleach her skin white’
A BLACK South African nurse who was working in the UK was told to “bleach her skin white” after a racial incident, a tribunal heard this week.
Adelaide Kweyama said a senior nurse made the comment after she had reported a patient had racially abused her.
The tribunal also heard that this was not the only racial victimisation Kweyama had faced while working as an agency nurse at an immigrant removal centre at Heathrow. On previous occasions a group of male detainees had called her n ***** , monkey and had made monkey and dog noises.
Kweyama had worked as an agency nurse between November 2017 and February 2019 and had regularly completed shifts at the immigration removal centre, which housed around 600 male detainees from a number of countries. They are sent to the centre pending their deportation from the UK.
During one incident, according to the Daily Mail, Kweyama was attending to a detainee at the centre who racially abused her and pretended not to be able to speak English.
When she told a senior nurse about it, the panel heard that the nurse said: “You need to get a pool of bleach to bleach your skin so that you come back tomorrow white and the patient will be nice to you.”
Later that day Kweyama said she overheard the nurse telling a colleague: “I do not care, let her go and bleach her skin, I am sick and tired of people coming to work and saying they are not well.”
Kweyama had filed an electronic incident report about the other racial abuses she had experienced, the tribunal heard.
However, NHS managers had failed to update her on the progress of the complaint and what steps had been taken to prevent it from happening again.
An employment judge criticised the NHS for the way it dealt with the incidents, saying that it was an “absolute abdication of the positive responsibility on managers”.
In the same month that she was told to bleach her skin white, Kweyama’s employment contract was terminated.
She was however able to successfully sue her employer, the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, for race-related harassment and victimisation.
The employment tribunal that was held in Watford found that Kweyama was the victim of race-related harassment and victimisation when she was told to “bleach her skin”. The tribunal also ruled that her boss had victimised her by using the same comment when she was told her employment was being terminated.
However her complaint of direct race discrimination was dismissed.
She will however have to wait for the remedy hearing that will be held at a later date.