Diversity Officers in the NHS: A Life-Saving Necessity, or Just Another Expensive Hobby?

If you were to wander into an NHS hospital today—assuming you could even get in without first perishing in an ambulance queue—you might expect to see doctors, nurses, and medical staff frantically trying to keep people alive. What you might not expect is an entire department dedicated to "embedding inclusive frameworks," whatever that means.

But lo and behold, amid the crumbling ceilings, the malfunctioning computers running on Windows 95, and the waiting times so long they require a separate NHS department just to apologise for them, there exists a well-paid army of Diversity and Inclusion Officers.

Their mission? To make sure your trip to hospital is not only medically sound but also a spiritually enriching voyage through the kaleidoscope of identity politics.

"Sorry, We Can’t Fix Your Broken Leg, But Have You Considered a Seminar on Privilege?"

It’s 3 AM. You’ve broken your leg after tripping over the dog, who was also injured in the incident and now requires a separate waiting list for animal care. You arrive at A&E, where a receptionist with the haunted look of someone who hasn’t had a lunch break since 2017 informs you that the estimated waiting time is "somewhere between six hours and infinity."

Just as you prepare to resign yourself to a life of hobbling, a Senior Director of Inclusivity and Transformation swoops in to check whether your patient experience is sufficiently culturally sensitive.

"Would you like a leaflet on NHS allyship strategies?" they ask, while your shinbone pokes through your skin.

You decline. You just want a doctor.

"Would you like to participate in our feedback survey on decolonising the patient waiting experience?"

No, you would like some painkillers and a functioning healthcare system, please.

A Department That Produces More Reports Than Results

Let’s break this down. The NHS is fundamentally about saving lives. That’s its job. That’s why we fund it. But for some reason, it’s now spending millions employing people whose main achievement is ensuring that nobody, under any circumstances, can complete a sentence without using the word "equity."

And if you ever wondered what these officers do all day, the answer is:

• They write reports – endless, sprawling documents on "inclusive recruitment strategies" that no one outside of LinkedIn ever reads.

• They hold workshops – where overworked nurses are dragged into meetings about "unconscious bias," instead of, you know, treating patients.

• They form committees – because nothing says "efficient healthcare system" like a 42-person task force on intersectionality in stethoscope design.

Meanwhile, actual medical professionals are so overworked that they’ve started making TikTok videos just to remind us they exist.

The Great NHS Cash Bonfire

Now, let’s talk money. The NHS is broke. Not just a little bit broke, but the kind of broke where entire hospitals have to sell off land to keep the lights on. And yet, despite this, we have £40 million per year to spend on diversity and inclusion roles.

Let’s put that into perspective:

• That could fund over 1,200 new nurses.

• Or pay for 5 million GP appointments.

• Or, alternatively, print out every diversity report ever written and build a new hospital out of the paperwork.

And before anyone says, "But diversity is important!"—yes, of course it is. But does it require an entire bureaucratic ecosystem? The NHS already has policies to ensure fair hiring. It already recruits people from all backgrounds. It already treats patients regardless of who they are. The actual issue is that there simply aren’t enough doctors or nurses to go around.

You could have the most diverse and inclusive hospital in the world, but if you don’t have enough medical staff, all you’ve really built is a very expensive waiting room.

Diversity Should Be a Reality, Not a Bureaucracy

Let’s be clear: nobody is arguing against diversity in the NHS. A health service should reflect the people it serves, and patients should be treated equally and fairly. But you don’t need a Deputy Vice Chancellor for Intersectional Care Pathways to achieve that. You just need a fair recruitment system that hires the best people for the job, regardless of their background.

And yet, instead of doing the simple, obvious thing, the NHS has chosen the path of death by PowerPoint, where we now have to suffer through endless initiatives, training days, and policies so dense they make War and Peace look like a quick read.

Scrap the Job Titles, Hire More Doctors

So, do we really need Diversity Officers in the NHS? No. What we need is a functioning system where:

• Hiring is fair and based on merit.

• Staff are treated well and paid properly.

• Patients can actually see a doctor without needing to take early retirement first.

Diversity isn’t something you enforce through bureaucracy; it’s something that happens naturally when you hire the right people based on talent, not tokenism.

Instead, the NHS continues to sink under the weight of endless committees, meaningless reports, and well-meaning but entirely pointless initiatives. And until someone realises that saving lives is slightly more important than "reverse mentorship schemes", we’re all just going to have to get very, very comfortable in those waiting rooms.