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U.K. race chief says Asian, African doctors facing bias

Hasan Suroor

LONDON: Hundreds of Asian and African doctors, working in Britain's National Health Service (NHS), are victims of covert racial discrimination and stuck on the promotion ladder, according to the Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips.

Mr Phillips, who is of Guyanese origin, said that although nearly two-thirds of the senior doctors in the NHS were from ethnic minority groups they were denied promotion to the top rank in Britain's medical pecking order — the consultant's grade — because of the colour of their skin.

Racial segregation

"The grade (called an SAS grade) just below consultant is absolutely stuffed with minority doctors. And they're just stuck there. That's not because they're uneducated, not because they're poor, but because they are black and Asian,'' Mr Phillips said in an outspoken interview with The Independent. Mr Phillips, who recently warned that Britain was "sleep-walking'' into racial segregation, said the Commission had received hundreds of complaints of racial discrimination in the NHS, and this could lead to a full-scale inquiry into how ethnic minority staff were treated in Government hospitals.

He said the discrimination was not overt, but there was a "pattern of behaviour'' that smacked of racism.

"They're being discriminated not because somebody's walking down the hospital corridor and saying, `excuse me, Dr Patel, would you shine my shoes', but because they don't belong to the consultants' club... And what is the reason? Not because they are poor. These guys are earning money but they can't break through into consultants' ranks. And if you look at the numbers, it is unmistakable,'' Mr Phillips said.

The CRE chiefsaid that though race relation laws had been in existence for more than 40 years, racial discrimination was still very much alive but it had become more covert, and indirect.

"We are now getting into the territory where people don't want to do down black people.

"We are now moving into the far more difficult territory where patterns of racial bias are emerging in spite of everybody doing the right thing,'' Mr Phillips said, calling for race laws to be given more teeth.

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