Inside Royal Stoke University Hospital, overlooking the cavernous foyer, is a banner featuring 21 flags.
The first bears the familiar rainbow colours of Gay Pride. The others, local health officials inform us, represent different genders and sexualities ‘which symbolises our commitment to achieving a more inclusive organisation where both colleagues and the people we care for are encouraged to be themselves’.
So, there is a transgender flag — light blue, pink and white (for those whose gender identity differs to their birth sex); a non-binary flag — yellow, white, purple and black (for those who do not identify as solely male or female); a pansexual flag — pink, yellow and cyan (for those attracted to all genders); and an intersex flag — yellow with a purple circle (for those who do not fit typical notions of male or female bodies), to mention just four of the classifications.
Above the banner, measuring some 45ft, is the message: ‘EVERYONE IS WELCOME HERE.’
How will this help reduce waiting lists at the Royal Stoke, which is run by the University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust (UHNM), among the worst performing in the country, where patients are treated on trolleys in the corridor? It’s a question many in Stoke will surely be asking themselves. Apart from anything else, the former Potteries capital, one of the most deprived cities in Britain, is about as far removed from fashionable ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’ policies as it is possible to be.
Nearly 90 per cent of the population are heterosexual, according to the 2021 census. Most of the categories featured on the banner are too statistically insignificant to be recorded. Polysexual? Polyamorous?
Neutrois? Aromantic? Agenda?
Admittedly, the Trust only paid a printing company £239 (£199 plus VAT) to make the banner.
Behind it, though, are NHS managers on six-figure salaries and what almost everyone believes — apart from the managers themselves — are a skewed set of priorities at a time when the NHS, metaphorically speaking, is on the critical list.
‘It’s absolute madness,’ said a nurse, shaking her head, after she emerged, looking exhausted, from the hospital following a ten-hour shift earlier this week.
‘No one even consulted us about the flags. Me and the rest of my team are up there on our knees because we’re so tired and understaffed but rather than put vital investment into frontline care, the Trust would rather spend valuable money on a ridiculous banner.’
The nurse, in her 30s, with her scrubs clearly visible under her fleece, asked not to be named, which is perhaps telling, in itself. Her views — nothing more than the truth and old-fashioned common sense — are at odds with the ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’ (EDI) regime inside the hospital.
Seven people, it transpires, work for the EDI team at UHNM, including three part-time staff, at a total cost of £333,707.
Inside Royal Stoke University Hospital, overlooking the cavernous foyer, is a banner featuring 21 flags celebrating different genders and sexualities
Stoke is run by the University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust (UHNM), among the worst performing in the country
The question is being asked, how will the politically correct banner help reduce waiting lists at the Royal Stoke?
But that’s not the only story. UHNM declined to disclose individual salaries. However, the role of chief people officer Jane Haire, who has 30 years’ experience in the NHS, typically attracts a salary of £120,000 to £140,000 per annum.
In 2022, the Trust also advertised for a deputy chief people officer offering between £95,125 and £109,475 a year and in 2023 an assistant director was being sought to ‘lead on organisational development, culture and inclusion’, working under the chief people officer (Ms Haire) and her deputy, on an annual pay package of £58,972 to £68,525.
A recent advertisement for a nurse, on the other hand, was offering the successful applicant a salary of £28,407-£34,581.
Hasn’t something gone badly wrong here?
Across the NHS as a whole, according to a freedom of information response, at least 882 staff are employed in diversity-related roles at 241 NHS organisations. Total EDI bill: £40 million.
The NHS Confederation, the leading healthcare membership body, blithely dismisses the figure as a ‘small proportion of the annual NHS budget’.
Maybe it is. But £40 million would still pay for the salaries of 1,150 nurses. Nowhere are they more badly needed than at Royal Stoke.
The cultural transformation of the NHS, where being demisexual (someone whose sexual feelings depend on an emotional bond) or demiromantic (someone who needs an emotional bond to feel romantic) results in a flag being printed on a banner and put on display in one of the biggest hospitals in the country, is almost Kafkaesque.
It is a transformation, moreover, which has occurred in plain sight.
The strategy which is supposed to promote inclusion is having precisely the opposite effect, much like directives from the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984.
‘The role of the NHS is to deliver care to all who need it, not to promote fashionable political ideologies,’ said Bev Jackson of the LGB Alliance, founded five years ago in opposition to the policies of the Stonewall campaign group on transgender issues.
‘These silly flags only serve to alienate those of us who are same-sex attracted. If the NHS wants to be more welcoming to LGB, it should stop associating us with made-up genders and meaningless neosexualities, and spend the money on improving care.’
Today most staff in this brave new world are too scared to even voice disagreement.
Take the booklet, issued by the South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, containing instructions to managers not to make ‘supportive comments such as “I understand your concerns” to staff who, for example, complain about trans or non-binary colleagues having access to gendered spaces’.
That could include female staff, say, worried about having to share the toilets with transgender women — biological men, in other words.
So much for inclusion.
The truth the NHS doesn’t want to hear is that the vast majority of staff and patients believe sex is determined by biology and also believe in treating members of the LGBTQ+ community with dignity and respect. It is perfectly possible to be both things at the same time.
But not, it seems, in the NHS. Instead, anyone who honestly speaks their mind is in danger of being disciplined and portrayed as a bigot by the militant trans lobby, an ideology the NHS has tacitly embraced.
So much for everyone is welcome at Royal Stoke. How did we get here? The journey which ended with that banner being unfurled began with the 2010 Equality Act. One of the main aims of Section 149 was to ‘advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not’.
Among those ‘protected characteristics’ were ‘gender reassignment’ and ‘sexual orientation’.
But the legislation has been interpreted and expanded beyond all recognition down the years in a way that few people could have predicted.
Successive health secretaries Sajid Javid and Steve Barclay tried to crackdown on ‘woke and wokery’ and Victoria Atkins, the current incumbent, has been crystal clear that biological sex matters. Nevertheless, the diversity juggernaut keeps rolling on where the NHS ‘blob’, not elected politicians, are effectively in charge.
It’s a narrative which seems, for all intents and purposes, to have been borne out by recent developments.
Doctors have been asked to fill in forms that involved ticking a box on which genitalia patients had, 18 gender options were listed on another form, smear tests are being offered to ‘people with a cervix’ and, according to the latest guidance, ‘not everyone who experiences menopause is a woman’.
‘Gender inclusive policies’, it seems, are writing women out of the NHS in a way that men aren’t.
The increasingly dogmatic blueprint coincides with the growing influence of LGBT lobby group Stonewall. Stoke is a prime example.
The banner in the Royal Stoke was part of an EDI programme devised in the light of a Stonewall ‘LGBT in Britain Health Report’ in 2018. The survey of more than 5,000 LGBT people reportedly found almost one in four LGBT people (23 per cent) witnessed discriminatory or negative remarks by healthcare staff and one in seven (14 per cent) have avoided treatment for fear of discrimination.
The statistics are quoted in an ‘equality and diversity’ section of UHNM’s website which highlights its participation in the NHS Rainbow Badge Scheme.
The scheme is intended to show that the Trust is an ‘open and non-judgmental and inclusive place for people that identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, with the + meaning inclusivity of all identities.’
This now includes Pansexual, Polysexual, Demisexual and Asexual… and 17 other genders and sexual orientations, of course.
How much credence the Trust should have given to the findings in the Stonewall report which underpins its gender policies is questionable.
In 2022, the Government’s Legal Department (GLD) dropped Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme, under which employers pay a fee for advice on the implementation of equality laws, after its former chief executive likened ‘gender-critical’ beliefs to anti-Semitism.
Stonewall has been accused of ‘playing a significant role’ in ‘trans-extremism’ and using its rankings, a ‘protection racket’, to quote one leading feminist, to ‘coerce’ public bodies into lobbying for changes to sex and gender laws.
But UHNM still signed up to the Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index — which benchmarks progress in LBGT+ inclusion in the workplace — in 2018 and 2020 and again in 2022.
UHNM says it has no plans to participate further, having scored badly, in fact, three years running, which gives you some indication, given what has happened in Stoke, of just how entrenched in woke culture higher-placed Trusts must be.
At times, it is easy to forget that the Royal Stoke is actually a hospital with an 18-month waiting list for operations last year, the fourth worst in the country.
‘Extreme pressure’ on A&E resulted in a ‘critical incident’ being declared, earlier this month, for the third time this year. Between April and December last year, there was a spike in superbug infections.
So the flags have not gone down well with the people who matter most — patients and their families, at least those who spoke to us this week.
David Hughes, a retired IT project manager, was waiting for his wife who has a heart condition and was undergoing an ECG.
‘Absolutely crazy’ is how he described the banner hanging just above his head in the huge foyer.
He added: ‘I think the NHS should be spending its money on those that need care, not this ridiculous woke agenda.’
Another patient, Lynda Harnett, 66, a retired business manager, was equally irritated.
‘I agree that everyone should be included in our society but it should not be falling to the NHS to do this sort of thing,’ she said. ‘It strikes me as a waste of money that really ought to be going into patient care.
‘This is where taxpayers’ money should be spent, not on an inclusiveness campaign, no matter how well intended it is. The NHS needs every penny it can get.’
There has also been a backlash online. One post in particular, in the form a spoof letter from the hospital, encapsulated the nonsense.
‘Dear Patient, we can’t do your hip replacement today, we’ve spent the cash on a new flag. Please advise your pronoun, as we are now prioritising operations based on this.’
It is signed ‘regards, Woke Administration Dept’… which doesn’t seem a million miles from the truth, does it?
Additional reporting: Nic North and Tim Stewart
