Dr. Qureshi is a luminary – but again and again he has to let his patients’ parents abuse him. He demands that hospitals should no longer accept this racism.
Patient racism plagues all hospitals. And they have a hard time, because isn’t it their job to help the patient? Even if they are unreasonable and offensive? But racist prejudice hits doctors and nurses more deeply than senseless insults to drunk people. In the British Daily Mail, pediatrician Dr. Qureshi his life.
An experience: in the morning at three o’clock he is called for a delivery. If a doctor has to come like him, that usually doesn’t mean anything good. Zeshan Qureshi prepares to help the child and parents, enters the cabin and is insulted.
The doctor is a polite man who does not pretend to repeat the abuse. It boils down to the fact that the man will not allow an “Asian” to see his wife so exposed. Qureshi escapes from the cabin, fearing the man might lash out. And it gets worse, the nurse steps in. But she also apologizes to the racist. There is nothing she can do, only “foreign doctors” are there at night – “sorry”. Qureshi was born in London. But the situation is complicated. The plumber emergency service would probably have packed things up without a word, but that’s not an option in the hospital. “I can’t just walk away. The thought barely crosses my mind. These babies all need immediate medical attention, without exception.”
Dr. Qureshi is a luminary in his field, having published 15 medical textbooks, started his own business, and won awards and taught around the world. That night he has to be happy when a racist nutcase lets him save his child after the nurse has made it clear to him that he has no choice. Later the man comes up to him again, he apologizes – sincerely, as the doctor remarks.
Poisons the joy of work
For Qureshi, the matter is not closed. “What worries me more than the insults themselves is how all of this has been accepted by my colleagues.” As a doctor from an ethnic minority who works in the stately health sector, he is used to a certain amount of racist insults. During his training, he was told by patients that he should “work better in a curry snack bar”. He now knows that this is not an isolated incident. The hostile mood has intensified in the Covid pandemic. Dr. Serious incidents were reported to Qureshi and an Asian medical student was accused of “eating bats” and “causing the pandemic”. Others have to hear that they are “foreigners who steal jobs”.
What annoys Qureshi most of all is that the hospitals simply accept the racism of the patients. “Some patients have racist beliefs and want their doctors to be white.” The government forbids responding to such “requests”. “If a patient asks to be treated by a white doctor, the answer is no,” wrote Health Secretary Matt Hancock in 2019. But that doesn’t help in practice. A white doctor is often sent with a shrug to keep things running smoothly. The situation is particularly complicated for paediatricians because the racists are the parents and not the child. But giving in leads to increasingly absurd solutions. Dr. Qureshi knows cases in which a white doctor was dragged out of bed at night because the emergency room couldn’t find a white man.
Dr. Qureshi understands that not treating these patients is not an option. In emergencies you have to call a white doctor, he writes, but not otherwise. He also demands that such cases be documented and reported to the police, because the hospitals are not a legal vacuum
