THE NATIONAL Health Service would collapse without ethnic minority staff, a director at NHS England has said.

Yvonne Coghill, director, Workforce Race Equality Standard Implementation Team, NHS England, whose career in the health service spans 40 years, works to support black, Asian and minority staff.

Amid the widespread concerns about the safety of black and ethnic minority employees in the care sector during the coronavirus outbreak, Coghill told The Voice that supporting them remained of the highest importance to her.

“My personal priority around all of this is to keep supporting black and ethnic minority staff who are on the frontline to the best of my ability,” she said. “I try to keep people’s spirits up… to say we really value you and appreciate you and from behind the scenes doing exactly the same thing – trying to get our senior leaders to recognise that they need to keep this thing called equality on the front burner as opposed to putting it on the back burner and thinking that it is something that they can deal with afterwards.”

She added: “We have to deal with this as now, making sure that all of our staff feel appreciated and valued.”

There have been complaints that black and ethnic minority staff had been whitewashed from mainstream media coverage of the Clap for Our Carers campaign and black nursing staff have spoke to The Voice of their sadness at seeing the sacrifices of their colleagues sidelined.

Coghill, whose mother came to the UK from Guyana and worked as an auxiliary nurse, emphasised the importance of black and ethnic minority Britons and those working in the health service from overseas without whom she said “the NHS would collapse”.

Heroes

“People have come from all over the world to support the NHS to be one of the best healthcare organisations that it could be,” she said.

She added: “We just could not function and particularly in London where we have a majority minority nursing workforce – more black and ethnic minority senior nurses than white nurses in London. Across the country we have 20 per cent, one in five of our nurses are from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. Our doctors again, 45 per cent of them are from black and minority ethnic backgrounds so the NHS would not exist, it could not function without these people and that needs to be acknowledged and recognised.”

“They’re out there on the frontline every day giving up their best”

Coghill thanked those working to save lives in the face of “horrible adversity” and reiterated that they were “appreciated and admired”.

She also spoke of the anti-immigration rhetoric of recent years and the Windrush scandal and its effect on staff from overseas working in the health service.

“All of that, it impacts on people and how they think about how they feel and how they believe themselves to be part of the UK. And despite all of that, these people are still putting themselves on the frontline and still getting up every day and going into situations which most of us would want to run away from so for me they are…heroes.”

“They’re out there on the frontline every day giving up their best,” she said.

And in some cases, staff are giving their all, even their lives while fighting to secure adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) for themselves and their colleagues.

The lack of PPE is something that NHS staff around the country have been expressing their fears over and the government has faced repeated questioning about. Coghill said difficulties around distribution and sourcing the necessary equipment had hampered supplies.

“It’s not something that people planned for and we knew was coming so it isn’t as if it’s just England that’s looking for PPE, every single person in the world who can is on the phone getting companies to get them PPE – that’s a fact.

“So once we get this stuff, and lots of companies are making it and doing what they need to do to produce this stuff, it goes to a warehouse and then it needs to be distributed…across all of the country. And if people are using it appropriately and properly, a lot of it is going to be used,” Coghill said.

But while Coghill maintained that according to reports she had received from NHS staff roughly a week ago was that the situation was improving, she said that there was more work to be done.

“It’s not 100 per cent there but it’s much better than it was,” she said. “People are right to be concerned, there’s no ifs or buts about that, it’s their own personal safety, it’s for them to feel safe, their families, to know that they feel safe and for us working in health to know that they feel safe.”