Ruislip & Eastcote & Northwood Gazette
Nurse was told to ‘bleach skin white’
MEDIC CALLED ‘MENTALLY UNWELL’ WHEN SHE COMPLAINED
A London NHS Trust has been found liable for race-related harassment after a nurse told another nurse to bleach their skin so that “patients will be nicer to you”, an employment tribunal has found.
When agency nurse at Central North West London Trust (CNWL) Ms A Kweyama, complained about the harassment, her boss suggested she might be mentally unwell which was “humiliating and offensive”, Employment Judge George ruled this week.
Ms Kweyama was a nurse at Heathrow Immigration Removal Centre, at the time run by CNWL, which houses immigration detainees from a wide range of countries pending their removal from the UK – it has a capacity of 965 residents, making it the largest immigration removal centre in Europe.
The nurse, who is black and originally from South Africa, was racially abused by detainees in an incident in
January 2019 when she said they “started calling [her] n****r, monkey, and started making monkey noises and dog noises”.
When Ms Kweyama suggested to a colleague, anonymised as ‘LS’ that the comments were due to her race, LS allegedly said: ‘You need to get a pool of bleach to bleach your skin so so that you come back tomorrow white and the patients will be nice to you”.
The Heathrow IRC, combines Colnebrook and Harmondsworth removals centres, looks after all residents needs until the outcome of their case is decided by the Home Office – removal or temporary admission into the UK (Image: StreetView)
On February 10, 2019 the same nurse was overheard saying: “I do not care let her go into bleach her skin, I am sick and tired of people coming to work and said they are not well”. Ms Kweyama at first declined to submit a formal incident form, saying ‘it’s what staff put up with all the time’, however a formal process was eventually followed.
However, Employment Judge George ruled that the case was dropped too early and there was little attempt to discuss how such incidents could be prevented in future. An employment tribunal, attended by representatives of the Trust, published today (Monday, October 24) ruled that the trust was liable for the race-related harassment and victimisation including a failure to fully investigate the complaint.
The ruling also detailed how Ms Keywama’s boss told her she was mentally unwell when she asked for a break due to feeling anxious about how she was treated. She was told her that her reaction to being racially abused was “excessive” and that her role was being terminated, which her boss denied.
Employment Judge George wrote in the report: “It is possible that LS was not deliberately intending to be hurtful but objectively what she said most certainly was. We have accepted that LS did make the comments about skin bleaching she did so in response to the claimant’s verbal complaint that- she may have been treated differently by the Albanian detainee she had seen that morning than LS had been because she is black or because LS is white.
“We conclude that this comment by [Ms Kweyama] that she was suffering race discrimination from a third party at work, was part of the reason why LS made the skin bleaching comment. This allegation of victimization is made out. We consider that it was an absolute abdication of the positive responsibility on managers for there apparently to have been no follow-up with the claimant to tell her what was happening with her complaint, or what steps, if any, would or could be taken to minimise the chance of such an event happening again.
“There are clear failings in the investigation and the decision to close it so quickly. We recognize that these probably had to do with the fact that it was made by an agency worker rather than employee. We do not consider this to be a good reason.
“For a manager to say that the way that someone has complained about race racial abuse causes that manager to have concerns that she is mentally unwell could reasonably be regarded by that individual as violating their dignity or creating a humiliating atmosphere for them. It is absolutely clear from her oral evidence that the claimant considered the suggestion that she had mental health problems to offend her professionalism.”