Real Nurses and Others: Racism in Nursing

by Tania Das Gupta

Based on a recent survey of more than 500 Ontario Nursing Association members, this study demonstrates how racism impacts working relations in the nursing profession. Gender and class concepts are explored as well as how fear, lack of support, management collaboration, and ineffective institutional responses make it difficult for victims to fight back. Dealing with the concept of racism within the frameworks of human rights legislation and the political economy of health care, this reference illustrates its causes in detail, providing a foundation from which nurses and other workers can combat racial harassment.

127 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2009

Reviews

[Sinthu Srikanthan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an eye-opening account of racism in the profession of nursing as it occurs in the city of Toronto. The author draws from her research with predominantly Black nurses in Ontario to detail how racism occurs, on the ground, in health care. There are rich case examples of everyday racism, which include targeting, excessive monitoring, and denial of disability accommodations for racialized nurses. The author also draws attention to the political economy of health care, noting the segregation of nurses, with those who are racialized being more likely to be employed in undesirable and heavy care settings, such as continuing complex care, and less likely to be employed in managerial roles as well as more desirable units such as the ICU, operating room, and Emergency Room. Finally, I found the author’s account of hiring practices that disadvantage Black and racialized nurses, such as based on word of mouth hiring and vague criteria such as “fitness” and “communication skills,” to be very interesting and sadly, reflective of labour market practices today. I encourage all nurses as well as racialized women working in health care to read this book to help make sense of their work experiences.

[Graham Worthington · Rating 4 out of 5]

Universal health care is as Canadian as ice hockey or maple syrup.... In recent years, deteriorating conditions in health care have lead to a great deal of anxiety about the erosion of this element of our identity."
With these measured sentences, Dr. Das Gupta identifies the need for a critical examination of the growing crisis in Canada's health care system.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of our hospitals has seen the signs of decay: lengthening waiting times in emergency centers, the closure of hospitals, the threat of privatization, the overloading of nursing staff, and the filthy conditions in many hospital wards.
With these problems afflicting and harassing the public, we definitely do not need the complications of the creeping racism that Dr. Das Gupta's dissection reveals beneath the cosmetic glow of health care's image, nor of the genderism, sexism, classism and other forms of prejudice that are its kin.
It is an error to assume that racism and its ilk is now a thing of the past, banished into history by the passing of laws. Today's racism is a more subtle beast than yesterday's. The shouted insult, the open denial of rights and opportunity; these cannot now be used as open attack, and so take new shape, as excess and unneeded supervision, or the close scrutiny of petty faults, which in co-workers of the "correct" race or gender are ignored.
Dr. Das Gupta's work is a precise, comprehensive and scholarly description of this medieval situation, but it is possible for a reader to mistakenly to suppose that it is a piece of mere academic analysis. At least, not in my case.
In the past few months, starting in fact before Christmas, two close members of my family here in Toronto have gone through the harrowing, destructive experience of being severely ill. I've been closely involved with giving what help I can, which has amounted to one hell of a task. During these four months I've seen much of the inside of several Toronto hospitals, and I'm enraged at the experience; engraged, stressed, frustrated, and chewing at the bit to do something.
Rather than rant on about my feelings, let me just hit you with a few of the words and that spring to my mind in relation to health care and hospitals in Toronto: dirty, indifferent, dangerous; places so unsanitary and badly run, that going in with one illness can lead you to spend a month there with a worse one. Wards so dirty that you can write your name in the grime on the walls (you think I exaggerate? I did it. Try ward B4 at Sunnybrook Hospital. I didn't get past the first stroke of G, as there was no way I was putting the finger in my mouth again after touching that wall.)
There is a great deal of debate in the USA on the proposed health care reforms, and I understand that Canada is held up as a shining example of state supplied medical care. I've no fixed opinion as to what should happen in the USA - I don't live there - but what part exactly of our crumbling system do they want to copy? The difficulty that the elderly face if needing to find a new doctor, when doctors don't want to take the aged? The need for family members to practically act as bodyguards for their relatives, checking on every action of the hospitals to see what their latest goof-up is? Am I making this last one up? Try spending some time at the Scarborough Grace Hospital, Toronto.
"Not enough budget," some apologists may cry. Really? But when we see such non-cost items as racial equality and gender equality not being provided, should we reconsider the validity of the quick excuse of the recession? Let's try the more universal one: failure of complacent management to do its job.