Why does the NHS need diversity managers?

Sep 1, 2021 by

by Fraser Myers, spiked:

The NHS is often thought of as Britain’s state religion. However, there is a new set of official values noisily taking over our institutions. Although the drive for ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’ has animated the public sector and HR departments for decades, diversity initiatives have been given an enormous shot in the arm by the rise of wokeness and, in particular, last summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Not even the sacred NHS is immune from this.

This was illustrated perfectly when screenshots of job adverts for equality, diversity and inclusion managers in the NHS went viral this week. Some of these diversity roles pay over £75,000 per year – a far healthier salary than junior doctors or most nurses are taking home.

Many have rightly criticised the NHS for this wastefulness, especially at a time when the Covid pandemic is still being felt in hospitals (though thankfully at manageable levels). Over the past two years, Brits have been forced to endure some of the longest and harshest coronavirus restrictions in the world, in part thanks to the NHS’s lack of hospital beds and health workers. (Germany, for instance, has more than five times as many general and acute hospital beds as England.)

The diversity agenda is a serious distraction from the NHS’s key job of providing healthcare. Just before the second wave of Covid hit, some NHS managers were sounding the alarm about… white privilege. Earlier this year, NHS guidance on equality, diversity and inclusion was leaked to the public. It included an A-Z glossary of woke terminology, from ‘white fragility’ to ‘intersectionality’ that staff are presumably expected to be au fait with.

That the diversity agenda has come for the NHS tells us very clearly that it is truly limitless in its ambition – that there is no point at which an institution can become diverse enough to satisfy the demand for ever more diversity.

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