This article is taken from the July 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
The British Medical Journal reports that 17.2 per cent of white associate specialist doctors in the NHS have experienced harassment, bullying or abuse from managers, whilst 24.6 per cent of such doctors from ethnic minorities have done so.
The journal quotes Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of the King’s Fund, as saying, “Every year we see yet more appalling survey results exposing the persistent, everyday reality of racism in the NHS.”
I can well believe in the nastiness of NHS managers, but the article in the BMJ cites some other statistics, without commentary, that present a slightly different picture. A total of 11.1 per cent of white consultants, compared with 8 per cent of consultants from ethnic minorities, suffered physical assault by patients, relatives of patients or other members of the public in the last year.
These questions are not asked, let alone answered, in the BMJ report
The figures for junior doctors show a similar pattern, with 19.5 per cent of white doctors assaulted compared with 12.5 per cent of those from ethnic minorities, and 14.9 per cent of white associate specialist doctors were assaulted compared with 10.3 per cent of such doctors from ethnic minorities.
All these figures are self-reported, which has its drawbacks, though it seems to me they are more likely to have some objective correlation than reports of harassment and bullying (in some places you are deemed to have been bullied if you think you have been bullied, which is hardly a clarion call to resilience in the face of adversity).
There is also the question of by whom the doctors are assaulted, and why white doctors are assaulted more frequently than those of other ethnic groups. But these questions are not asked, let alone answered, in the BMJ report.
The latter has made an advance on the Queen of Hearts’s great jurisprudential principle of sentence first, verdict afterwards: namely, conclusion first, evidence afterwards or none at all. The conclusion, however, is a very useful, even a vital, one for the bureaucrats and careerists of diversity, equity and inclusion. There’s gold in them there ills.
