Member

They talked about one of their members, Jennifer Melle, a 40 year-old NHS nurse with 12 years of unblemished service in a hospital in Surrey. I thought it was worth using this illustration because the Minister was very passionate earlier, and rightly so, about emergency workers who have to suffer racial abuse. Jennifer Melle’s story is important because she is a black nurse who was dealing with a patient who happened to be a convicted male paedophile in a hospital in Surrey. Nurse Melle phoned the neurologist and referred to this patient as “he” and “Mr” while talking to the neurologist on the phone. The patient became very aggressive, started shouting racist abuse, used the most vile racial slurs and lunged at nurse Jennifer Melle, which was a terrible thing to happen. You would have expected her employers to protect her from that. It was racial, in that instance, towards a female front-line worker. What actually happened—