SA nurse’s big pay day in UK for racial slurs

“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 in the 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 comments 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”.

Kweyama, 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 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.

Kweyama said: “The whole incident was handled atrociously. I was born black. I will live black and I will die black – what is wrong with being black?”

She said she felt insulted, discriminated against, bullied, harassed and abused. “I was dehumanised.”