Johannesburg - ”Bleach your skin white so patients would be nice to you.”
This is what a black South African nurse, working at an immigrant removal centre at Heathrow, UK, was told and now she’s £25,000 (R552 527) richer after suing the National Health Service (NHS).
Adelaide Kweyama reported the racial abuse and won her case for race-related harassment and victimisation. Kweyama said she was shocked by the comment after she reported that a patient had racially abused her in February 2019.
A tribunal heard that Kweyama later overheard the senior nurse telling a colleague she was “tired of people coming to work and said they are not well and that Ms Kweyama should go and bleach her skin”.
The SA woman, who was working as an agency nurse, was also racially abused by a group of male detainees in a previous incident.
An employment judge criticised NHS bosses' response to the incident, describing it as an “absolute abdication of the positive responsibility on managers”.
According to a reserve judgment, released following the tribunal, the respondent subjected the claimant to race related harassment. The tribunal found that on February 9, 2019, Kweyama was told by a colleague: “You need to get a pool of bleach and bleach your skin so that you come back tomorrow white and the patients will be nice to you.”
On February 10, the same nurse who was overheard saying: “I do not care, let her go to bleach her skin, I am sick and tired of people coming to work and said they are not well.”
On February 22, the deputy lead nurse for Offender Care said she was concerned about Kweyama’s mental health because some of the words used in her statement to complain of the race related harassment were “worrying”.
But the drama didn’t end there for Kweyama. The NHS also tried to deduct money from her salary and a judge initially dismissed her claim of “unauthorised deduction from wages”, saying the complaint of direct race discrimination was not well founded.
The employment tribunal held in Watford heard that Kweyama worked as an agency nurse between November 2017 and February 2019, regularly carrying out shifts as an agency nurse at the immigration removal centre. The centre houses around 600 male immigration detainees from a wide range of countries pending their removal from the UK.
The detainees receive medical treatment from Trust staff prior to being deported. The panel was told that in January 2019 Kweyama was racially abused by a group of detainees who were waiting for their medication to be administered. The nurse told them to come one by one for their medication and to close the door and was then racially abused.
“The detainees started calling me n****r, monkey, and started making monkey noises and dog noises, demanding to come in at the same time,” she said.
The nurse subsequently filed an electronic incident report about the incident, the tribunal heard. The panel also heard that “overworked” NHS managers failed to keep her updated on the progress of her complaint and did not tell her what steps had been taken to minimise the chance of such an event recurring.
In another incident, Kweyama was attending to a detainee who was racially abusive to her and pretended he could not speak or understand English.
A few weeks after the incident, Kweyama emailed her agency informing them she was unable to work at the Heathrow centre because she had become very depressed and needed time to recover psychologically and emotionally.
The tribunal concluded that the nurse had indeed been the victim of race related harassment and victimisation when she was told to “bleach her skin”.
Kweyama was also victimised for the same comments and when she was told her agency role was being terminated, the tribunal ruled.
Kweyama said: “The whole incident was handled atrociously. I was expecting support and reassurance from my nurse in charge whilst I was verbally abused by a patient, but I was appalled to get second abuse from her as my colleague telling me something that I cannot change. I was born black. I will live black and I will die black - what is wrong with being black?”
Kweyama said she felt very insulted, discriminated against, bullied, harassed, and abused.
“I was dehumanised in front of my colleagues, I am now going through a lot of stress and it has impacted on my health. It is unbearable, it is emotional and psychological,” she said.