Kerre Woodham: Want only white nurses? You might be waiting a while

If you want to racially abuse hospital staff and demand white only nurses, fine. We will draw a curtain around your bed, and you’ll lie there and wait. You need pain relief, assistance to go to the loo, have your sheets changed, have your blood pressure monitored - make sure it's not getting dangerously high. You lie there and you wait. You wait for a white nurse to come on duty. You might be waiting a while.

I don't know how this ugly racist who the poor people at Waitakere Hospital have had the misfortune to be dealing with defines “whites only” in his tortured little brain. Do they mean Pakeha New Zealanders? Although I'm sure they never refer to them as Pakeha. Would an Irish nurse with a pale complexion but without New Zealand citizenship do? If it was based on whites only, I wouldn't have had the operations I've had done in a timely fashion if I was waiting for someone with a pale face to turn up and do them. Nor would I have had the care and attention I've received in hospital if I had depended on white only nursing staff and hospital aides to provide it.

More than 30 staff at one of Waitākere Hospital wards took the unusual step of signing a cease work order in July, after a patient had reportedly abused them and made sexually suggestive comments over a period of six weeks. They shouldn't have had to put up with it for a minute, far less six weeks. It was only when they signed the cease work order that management actually did something about it, and told the patient he would be discharged, or they'd call on the police if he didn't stop what he was doing immediately. And guess what he did? He stopped. That's what bullies do. You front up to them, you face them off and they will back down.

Six weeks they had to put up with this. Health workforce leaders say Health New Zealand needs clear national guidelines for responding to racial discrimination against staff, saying it should not have required a cease work order to resolve the incident, and no it bloody should not. Nor should hospital management acquiesce to any patient’s demands about the ethnicity of hospital workers. Remember the Herald report earlier this month that revealed leaders at North Shore Hospital agreed to a patients request to have no Asian staff at their surgery? A decision which angered workers and was condemned by unions. These are not isolated incidents.

I can't imagine how ugly the abuse would have had to have been for the staff to take a stand, because they're abused every single day – which is incomprehensible. These are people trying to help you, trying to fix you, trying to give you comfort no matter if you've bought about your own misfortune or not. They, unlike some of the patients, leave judgement at the door and they are professional, they are caring, they are skilled, and they are human. They have a breaking point – six weeks of constant abuse, a barrage of racial abuse and sexually suggestive comments, you know what? They're going to draw a line too. They also come from all over the world, as do hospital staff in just about every healthcare system in the world. Hospitals are a beautiful meld of cultures and ethnicities, all working together to do their very best for you.

You want whites only? You won't find any hospital anywhere in the world that can offer you that, because the global health system would collapse without the very best from every country in the world working collaboratively.  

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