Let's celebrate contemporary black nurses, not create a modern myth

The history of the National Health Service in Britain is a history of immigration. Many of the hospitals taken over by the NHS in 1948 were in a dilapidated state, and staff shortages were reaching critical levels. From the 1950s onwards, thousands of young women and men were lured to nursing in Britain from the pink-shaded areas of the globe - the former colonies of the West Indies, the Indian subcontinent, Mauritius, Malaysia and great swaths of Africa. As nurse training places were decreasingly filled by local people, by the 1970s a high proportion of the workforce in general hospitals was of black or Asian ethnicity. In some large mental institutions, where recruitment problems were worst, the majority of ward staff were from distant shores. From doctors to domestic staff, NHS hospitals were a multicultural community long before the diversification of wider British society after immigration surged in the 1990s. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.