A nurse has won £25,000 from the NHS after being told to bleach her skin white so patients would be nice to her.
Adelaide Kweyama, originally from South Africa, was awarded £25,713 from the NHS after being racially abused whilst working.
The comment was made by her boss in response to Ms Kweyama's complaints that one of her patients was racially abusing her.
Ms Kweyama, who was working as an agency nurse at an immigrant removal centre in Heathrow, was also racially abused by a group of male detainees in a previous incident.
An employment judge criticised NHS bosses handling of the situation, stating it was an "absolute abdication of the positive responsibility on managers".
Ms Kweyama sued Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust for race-related harassment and victimisation and won her case.
"The whole incident was handled atrociously", she said.
"I was expecting support and reassurance from my nurse in charge whilst I was verbally abused by a patient, but I was appalled to get second abuse from her as my colleague telling me something that I cannot change.
"I was born black I will live black and I will die black - what is wrong with being black?"
Ms Kweyama worked as an agency nurse between November 2017 and February 2019, regularly carrying out shifts as an agency nurse at the Heathrow immigrant removal centre.
The centre houses around 600 male immigration detainees from a wide range of countries pending their removal from the UK.
In January 2019, a racist incident occurred in which Ms Kweyama was racially abused by a group of detainees who were waiting for their medication to be administered.
Ms Kweyama told the tribunal: "[The detainees] started calling me n****r, monkey, and started making monkey noises and dog noises, demanding to come in at the same time."
In response to the incident, Ms Kweyama wrote an incident report about the incident.
However, the NHS managers failed to keep her updated on the progress of her complaints and refused to inform her of the steps that had been taken to minimise the chance of such an event happening again.
In another incident the following month, Ms Kweyama was attending to a detainee who was racially abusive to her and pretended he could not speak or understand English.
When Ms Kweyama raised the issue with her senior nurse but was told: "You need to get a pool of bleach to bleach your skin so that you come back tomorrow white and the patient will be nice to you."
Weeks after the incident, Ms Kweyama emailed her agency, Athona, and told them she was unable to work at the Heathrow centre any more after becoming depressed and needing time to recover emotionally from the incidents.
She said: "I felt very insulted, discriminated, bullied, harassed, and abused.
"I was dehumanised in front of my colleagues, I am now going through a lot of stress and has impacted on my health, it is unbearable, it is emotional and psychological."
In the same month, she was told by an NHS manager that her contract was being terminated follwing her complaints.
The tribunal agreed that the nurse had indeed been the victim of race-related harassment and victimisation when she was told to 'bleach her skin.'
Ms Kweyama was also victimised by her boss for the same comments and when she was told her agency role was being terminated, the tribunal ruled - However complaint of direct race discrimination was dismissed.
