So “diversity staff” have more valuable skills than…doctors?

There have been a slew of recent job postings offering roles in equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) at salaries that exceed specialist junior doctors.

They include an NHS England EDI secondment position covering the southwest of England offering a pro rata salary of £122,000 per year, and a head of EDI role at a London trust with a salary of £91,336.

Junior doctors earn a basic salary of between £36,616 and £70,425, while consultants receive between £105,504 to £139,882 per year.

You do have to wonder what skills EDI people have that merit that kind of pay. I don’t think the NHS is wrong to want “diversity” in the sense of having staff that are not all rich white men, on account of how patients are not all rich white men. But can’t they recruit female and brown people without shelling out hundreds of thousands of £s a year?

The NHS was ordered to stop recruiting for EDI jobs in 2023 by Steve Barclay, the Conservative former health secretary, after he uncovered a £96,000 job advert for a diversity role.

Barclay also told trusts to stop paying consultancies and external organisations to provide diversity training for staff, but he said that his edict was ignored by NHS bureaucrats, who are now recruiting “even more on eye-watering salaries”.

Couldn’t they just give staff a book or two?

[Wes] Streeting highlighted “some really daft things being done in the name of equality, diversity and inclusion”, and pointed to a member of NHS staff “who was merrily tweeting a job ad online and saying part of her practice was anti-whiteness”.

He was responding to a post by Dr Florencia Gysbertha, an NHS psychologist, who wrote in a social media advert for a job placement: “The trainee will be supervised by myself, a counselling psychologist, who integrates anti-whiteness/anti-racist praxis into supervision and approaches to clinical work.”

Streeting added: “And I just thought ‘what the hell does that say to the bloke up in Wigan who’s more likely to die earlier than his more affluent white counterpart down in London?’. We’ve got real issues of inequality that affect working-class people.”

But so few working class people are trans. They’re just not fun, if you know what I mean.

However, he is not preparing to sweep the roles away even though he said it would win him “quite a lot of plaudits”.

“Ask black nurses about their experiences of being bullied in the workplace,” he said. “You look at outcomes: prostate cancer, black men twice as likely to die of prostate cancer than white men; black women three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. We’ve got some real racial inequalities here.”

On the other hand they don’t have some real trans inequalities there.

An NHS spokeswoman said the health service “needs to take action to reduce health inequalities” and that a “diverse and inclusive workforce that better reflects the patient population leads to improved patient care”.

She added: “But equally we cannot make tokenistic gestures that don’t ultimately improve patient or staff experience.”

The grifters remind me of Robin DiAngelo, who gets huge fees for lecturing people about their white fragility. Cha-ching.