It’s time to act on racism in the NHS

Ethnic minority doctors and patients still face too many injustices in the NHS. The BMJ ’s special issue on racism in medicine (bmj.com/racism-in-medicine) maps some of them and asks how they might be overcome, from the fivefold higher maternal mortality among black women than among white women in the UK (doi:10.1136/bmj.m442; doi:10.1136/bmj.m424) to the gap in performance between white and ethnic minority students and doctors (doi:10.1136/bmj.m438) and the increased likelihood of disciplinary procedures against ethnic minority doctors (doi:10.1136/bmj.m338). In a joint BMJ and BMA investigation Zosia Kmietowicz found that medical schools are poor at recording students’ complaints of racial …