Improving equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace is everyone’s responsibility

Unconscious bias. My favourite topic! Unconscious bias is the quick processing of information to make immediate judgments. These assumptions might not always be right or reasonable and can affect a person’s behaviour or decisions.

In the nursing profession, we work every day with patients who have lots of protected characteristics, including age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.

Nursing staff also have these protected characteristics and employers must not make decisions about job applicants or staff based on these protected characteristics. Improving equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace is everyone’s responsibility. It’s important to sustaining and strengthening the workforce by dealing with those behaviours in a professional way. These behaviours so could lead to a discrimination claim to an employment tribunal.

As a woman of colour and an internationally trained nurse working in the NHS, I have lived experience of facing various unconscious biases. I experienced difficulties to challenge them, as these unconscious bias behaviours – most of the time – was the culture of the organisation. I can now name it as structural racism and discrimination and without resilience it would have wholly affected my life.

The NHS is such a fantastic place to work and has great operational systems, guidelines and strategies. However, some individuals who work for the NHS are not aware of those and I believe we should make unconscious bias training as mandatory as basic life support, infection control and fire training. Every person entering the NHS should be trained on the induction and periodically undertake a refresher course. In addition, I would recommend that managers receive mandatory advanced training in unconscious bias and should not be able to receive a promotion without it.

Currently one in six of the nursing workforce is internationally trained and the NHS is connected with over 200 countries. Each of these countries has different cultures and traditions, and nursing staff coming from abroad bring with them enormous experience, knowledge, and skills from their health care systems. Unfortunately, unconscious bias means that internationally recruited nursing staff are unrecognised, undervalued and underutilised.

Policy reports produced by the Tropical Health Education Training Trust (THET) in August 2021 highlighted those barriers and recommended that NHS organisations implement the Experts In Our Midst programme to unlock the potential of the diaspora workforce in the NHS. Likewise, the RCN has designed an innovative Cultural Ambassador (CA) Programme.

Read THET’s Experts in Our Midst policy report.

I have so much passion for involving any initiative which makes the NHS inclusive and I will continue to work to eradicate unconscious bias in the workplace.

Further reading links

Read more about how the RCN Congress agenda item on unconscious bias.