DEI as a self fulfilling prophecy to create tension and unrest:
Deep-rooted wokery is infecting our health service, say NHS whistleblowers
"In a hospital in northern England, a middle-aged patient is told he needs a CT scan. It’s an urgent cancer referral. So, he promptly follows the signs in the sprawling NHS hospital to radiology. As he prepares to be loaded into the scanner, staff run through the pre-procedure checks: Any allergies, heart disease, diabetes, previous reactions to X-ray dye? And: Could you be pregnant?
For one senior radiographer, Samantha*, this is a familiar scenario. “It’s mortifying to repeatedly ask middle-aged men – who at that moment have presented for life-saving treatment and are hooked up to monitors and multiple drips – what their sex is. Or worse, if they could be pregnant.”
In around 20 NHS trusts, all patients aged 12-55 having a scan using ionising radiation around the pelvis are quizzed over their pregnancy status – regardless of gender. One trust questions men as old as 60.
Samantha’s not alone. It’s an approach that’s driving widespread consternation among radiographers. The diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) principles are intended to ensure that under-represented groups are treated fairly in the workplace, but this is just one illustration of how an extreme, ideologically-driven form of DEI has captured the NHS.
According to senior NHS staff, many of whom have talked to The Telegraph anonymously for fear of repercussions for speaking out, it’s an ideology that is sowing division in previously harmonious wards, promoting radical “whiteness” theories and compromising patient care, all while diverting much-needed resources. Fancy earning £139,000 a year as equality, diversity and inclusion champion in the Women’s Health Network in the Welsh NHS?
However well-intentioned the original efforts may have been to stamp out discrimination, the message from NHS whistleblowers is clear: DEI has morphed into a pernicious virus that’s infected our health service...
The presentation for trainee clinical psychologists on an NHS-funded doctorate was replete with slides stating that the NHS “reproduce(s) whiteness, and uphold(s) notions of racial hierarchies, and bolsters institutional racism”. It twice mentions the term “eugenics” – the selective breeding Hitler was so fond of – as a sinister force that helped to shape (and continues to affect) the field of clinical psychology in Britain. Another slide explains: “Whiteness is a ‘protected secrecy’ [that’s been] legalised and justified by the State.”
Simon – not his real name; like so many people in this article he asked for anonymity, concerned for the career-curtailing consequences of questioning DEI – was one of the few white men on the course. Something that was made evidently clear to him.
“Anyone putting their hand up to say there are limitations to this ‘whiteness’ training would be looked at as, ‘Why have you white men got a problem with talking about white men having power?’,” remembers Simon.
Simon, in his mid-twenties with a passion for helping young people with psychosis, began to doubt his core values. “I thought, ‘Am I going mad or maybe I am a racist? Or maybe I have got something that I’m missing to not really be going along with this stuff?”‘
The irony of a mental-health course chipping away at an attendee’s sanity is one thing. But Simon says an oppressed/oppressor power fixation permeated all three years – dangerously ill-preparing our next generation of front-line therapists.
“I worry that we’re not training people to really deal with mental-health difficulties. We’re training people to just see the simplistic, reductive kind of activist angle on everything. A one-size-fits-all way of looking at things. And we’re missing so much.”
One urgent clinical need glaringly missing was men’s mental health – a crisis evidenced by shocking suicide rates.
“We were on a doctorate-level course – a very responsible position being trained to walk into the field when we were finished – and we never had a conversation about men’s mental health,” says Simon. “We had a day on feminism, on intersectional feminism, but we never covered men. We’re going off into the NHS not thinking about why these problems are happening for men.”
Whiteness training isn’t some esoteric quirk of a psychology course. It’s taken root in the main body of the NHS. York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust offers its more than 10,000 staff “anti-racism” training – which takes doctors, nurses and the like about four hours to complete, during which time, according to documentation I’ve seen, they will “develop a deeper understanding of white privilege and explore how race intersects with other aspects of identity”...
I’d long suspected that DEI wasn’t all warm and fuzzy HR kumbaya. Scratch that shiny virtue-signalling facade and you soon hit those dark underpinnings.
In 2021 it emerged that the head of diversity for Google had once said that Jewish people have “an insatiable appetite for war and killing”. And he is far from being the only senior figure in Diversity Inc (an industry now worth approximately $14bn a year) with questionable Jew-views, which all makes depressing sense when you trace today’s mainstream DEI back to its early 1970s critical race theory roots. A cultural Marxism-infused doctrine that simplistically divides the world into oppressed and oppressor ledgers. Inviolably in the oppressor column: white people, men, Jews...
In the US, while Coca-Cola was telling its employees to “try to be less white”, hospital staff were being taught that their latent racism was affecting patient care. Clete Weigel, a senior nurse in Ohio, questioned why complex, multi-factorial health disparities – such as the higher maternal mortality rates amongst black women in the state – were being put down solely to staff prejudice.
“We’re a medical facility that treats people on evidence-based medicine. What you’re doing here is not evidence-based at all,” he protested – and was told to do more implicit-bias training or lose his job. He quit...
Professors Frank Dobbin (Harvard) and Alexandra Kalev (Tel Aviv University) have analysed a data set of eight million workers from hundreds of companies who’ve been through DEI training.
DEI, the professors found, is fundamentally flawed by design. “Laboratory studies show this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out. People often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person,” report Dobbin and Kalev.
What’s more, asking people to suppress stereotypes tends to actually reinforce them (“try not thinking about elephants”). Coupled with findings that “whites generally feel they will not be treated fairly in workplaces with pro-diversity messages”, the upshot is that DEI is a multi-billion-dollar own goal.
“Trainers frequently report hostility and resistance, and trainees often leave ‘confused, angry, or with more animosity toward’ other groups. No under-represented group – white women or people of colour – sees a significant positive effect. We actually see a pattern of negative effects,” say Dobbin and Kalev.
As Weigel, the Ohio nurse, recalls of the training that led him to quit: “The first thing we’re going to do is focus on implicit bias, white supremacy, systemic racism. You’re white, so you’re guilty. It just divides people. It creates suspicion because you start looking for it.”
One ward sister I spoke to with 20 years’ experience doesn’t need the Harvard data to see that DEI is backfiring. She says she has always celebrated the multiculturalism of the NHS – one of the most diverse employers in Europe, with nearly 29 per cent of staff coming from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. “Everyone just worked together as part of one team,” she says – until DEI. “It’s caused division. It highlights everyone’s differences rather than pulling you together as a team.”
It’s a view echoed by many I’ve spoken to – including healthcare assistants, and senior staff working for trusts and NHS Blood and Transplant. One mental-health nurse explains: “The NHS was one of the least racist institutions, a very tolerant place to work, and then all of this stuff started coming in. It’s made the NHS a less harmonious place. Everybody is walking on eggshells.”
Charlotte*, a paramedic, has also found that DEI has spawned division. “I had never experienced racism from colleagues [for being black],” she says. “But the introduction of DEI training within the ambulance service has generated significant tension among staff.
“A strong focus on identifying ‘microaggressions’ has created an environment where staff feel reluctant to speak freely, share jokes or engage in the camaraderie that’s traditionally part of ambulance culture. It has resulted in discomfort on all sides: white staff often feel that anything they say could be misconstrued as racist, while black and Asian staff have been told certain words or phrases must be viewed as discriminatory.”
All of which, Charlotte says, has led to suspensions and disciplinary actions for “unintentional or minor comments”.
Others concur that the “race card” is increasingly being played – even when a psychiatric nurse sent home an agency worker for repeatedly falling asleep during a night shift while they were meant to be watching an at-risk patient. The worker then claimed the incident was race related; the nurse was suspended for six months while being investigated...
“It was like a session for primary school children,” recalls one ward sister. “Explaining why someone might wear a hijab or might not eat pork. I thought it was ridiculous and it was three hours long.”
“We went out into breakout groups to discuss how we might celebrate new year. It wasn’t just pointless, it was in the middle of winter [when the NHS is stretched] and our time could have been much better spent actually working.”
To that time cost, add the actual expense. NHS England reportedly spends £40m a year on diversity-focused staff. Public Health Wales recently offered that post for a diversity champion paying up to £139,882 a year – while generously conceding that “they do not need to be subject-matter experts”.
“We’re having to beg for money for new chairs for the office, yet we’ve got equality and diversity trainers on as much as a doctor,” laments a psychiatric nurse (of whom you could get about four for the price)...
“Having these ridiculous questions forced upon us is affecting patient care,” she says. “When you ask all patients what their sex is or if they’re pregnant, it instils doubt. We’re exposing them to a massive dose of radiation and they’re meant to trust us after we’ve just asked them the most obvious question.”
Concerns are widespread. A members’ survey by the Society of Radiographers generated 633 responses that “indicated staff were worried that male patients might get abusive or aggressive”. “Asking everyone… about pregnancy makes radiographers look incompetent,” said one respondent. Another stated: “Some of us believe that sex is binary, and we need to remember to be inclusive of women.”...
Samantha believes that the smarter way to ensure that no one pregnant gets accidentally irradiated – or is given the wrong dose of medication in somewhere like cardiology – is to use patients’ accurate biological sex markers throughout the NHS. On medical records, anyone over 18 can change their gender – which can easily then become mistakenly conflated with sex.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which guides the NHS on how to give patients optimum treatment, has a core principle: “Clear direction and priorities based on evidence.” A reassuringly evidence-based focus. But can that really be said of the DEI programmes rolled out across the NHS?
The exasperated radiographer says that some days she thinks she’d rather work in a coffee shop than the NHS.
“I went into medicine to make people better – not to make patients feel embarrassed and especially not to deny the immutability of biological sex. This deep-rooted wokery has developed a very toxic environment in our NHS and has to be removed – now there are enough of us willing to do it.”"
