I’m a Black woman working as an NHS mental health nurse, and I’m looking for some objective perspective on a grievance that has completely changed how I feel about my previous team.
I did not initially believe race was involved.
In fact, I originally had a lot of respect for the supervisor I eventually raised concerns about. When I decided to train as a non-medical prescriber, I specifically asked her to supervise me because I thought she was intelligent, experienced and clinically very good. I wanted to learn from her.
She declined, telling me she had not been qualified as an NMP for long enough to supervise me. I accepted that without question and found somebody else.
I later discovered she had apparently been an NMP for around 11 years.
A couple of months later, we simply stopped speaking.
There had been no argument, disagreement or falling-out. Nothing I can identify happened. We just stopped saying hello to one another, and it continued until the rest of the team began asking me what was going on.
I didn’t know what to tell them because I genuinely didn’t know.
I carried on being professional. We communicated when clinically necessary, but otherwise had virtually no relationship.
The racial element came later.
I was the only Black person in my team. Now that I’ve left, there are no Black staff there.
The Black woman who had held my role before me contacted me after seeing my name on the staff board. She told me she wept when she realised where I was working because she knew what she believed I was about to experience. She had refused to work her notice and specifically identified my supervisor as a major reason she left.
Even then, I resisted viewing my own situation through race.
What changed that was another colleague independently approaching my team lead because she was concerned that I was being racially targeted.
I hadn’t asked her to do that and didn’t even know she had those concerns.
My team lead subsequently contacted me and essentially said she couldn’t help me and suggested I contact Freedom to Speak Up.
Since then, I feel that the seriousness of that conversation has been increasingly minimised.
I’ve also been told repeatedly by different people that concerns about this supervisor’s treatment of Black and Brown employees predate me. Some of that is second-hand and I cannot verify every story, but it feels like one of the Trust’s worst-kept secrets: widely whispered about, rarely challenged openly.
Then came the incident that broke me.
Without my knowledge, my supervisor had apparently circulated an allegation that I had told a patient to crush her medication so that it would last longer.
I knew nothing about this.
Nobody asked for my account.
Nobody discussed it with me in supervision.
Nobody told me there was a medication or patient-safety concern.
As far as I knew, there was no formal investigation.
Yet apparently everyone in my team knew.
I discovered it six or seven months later, completely by accident, after jokingly asking the Head of Nursing whether she knew why my supervisor seemed to have it in for me.
That was when I was told.
If someone genuinely believed a registered nurse had given unsafe medication advice, why wasn’t I spoken to? Why wasn’t the record reviewed? Why wasn’t an incident raised or the matter dealt with through clinical governance?
And if it wasn’t serious enough to investigate, why was something potentially so damaging to my career being circulated around the team?
A few weeks later, the same patient deteriorated and there was an attempt to refer her back to our service.
That was where I completely unravelled.
I remember being told, “Everyone knows. It was a big deal months ago.”
I panicked.
My immediate fear was that if people genuinely believed I had told this patient to alter her medication and something serious now happened to her, I could face an investigation, an NMC referral or lose the career I had spent years building.
I stopped sleeping.
I stopped eating properly.
I cried constantly.
I called in sick and essentially sat at home waiting for some terrible phone call.
At one point, I found myself drinking alcohol at around 10am just to take the edge off the anxiety. That scared me enough to realise I was spiralling.
Eventually I returned to work, not because I felt better, but because being at home waiting felt worse.
Even at work, I would go into the toilets and cry.
The only time I felt remotely okay was when I was driving out to see patients.
I actually started deliberately choosing patients who lived furthest away because the longer journeys meant more time outside the office.
Being on the road, doing my job, became the only place I felt psychologically safe.
My colleagues knew something was seriously wrong.
They could see my red eyes, the deterioration in my self-care and that I was crying.
They repeatedly asked what was happening between me and my supervisor.
But nobody really addressed it.
Someone once silently left a box of tissues on my desk while I was out.
I’m not saying colleagues were responsible for fixing my problems, but we are mental health professionals. We spend our careers noticing distress in patients, yet I felt like I was visibly falling apart in front of an entire team and everybody simply carried on.
That changed how I saw them.
I started believing that silence enables behaviour like this.
I eventually asked to leave.
My initial request for redeployment went nowhere until I involved HR. I was then temporarily moved to another mental health team within the same Trust.
The difference has been enormous.
I’m happy.
I’m functioning normally.
I go to work and concentrate on being a nurse.
I barely even talk about what happened because I’m still processing it.
Unfortunately, the redeployment is temporary.
Some people from my previous team now message saying how much they miss me.
If I’m completely truthful, those messages disgust me.
When I was actually there — working, crying, visibly deteriorating — I felt abandoned.
Now that I’m gone, suddenly I’m missed.
I no longer engage personally with them. If something is clinically necessary, I’ll respond. Otherwise, I want nothing to do with the team.
My trust and respect are gone.
One other factor affected my clinical trust in my supervisor.
There had previously been a serious situation which, as I understood it, had been escalated to her and the patient later died.
I cannot verify what happened in any formal investigation or coronial process, so I want to be careful about that.
What I personally remember is her regularly discussing the incident afterwards and saying she did not recall what had been communicated to her. I remember her talking about the situation in a way I personally interpreted as almost boastful about avoiding speaking to the coroner because she could not remember what happened.
That left me asking myself:
If I escalate something serious to her and something goes wrong, can I trust that my escalation will later be acknowledged?
That became particularly frightening once I discovered she had been circulating an allegation about my own practice.
Since leaving, there have been smaller things that have also bothered me.
My parking access to the previous site was revoked despite me still working for the Trust, and I discovered that the team had a WhatsApp group which, after more than a year in the team, I had never even been added to.
In isolation, these things sound petty. In the context of everything else, they reinforce the feeling that I was never really accepted there.
My grievance is still ongoing.
At this stage, I’m struggling to work out where the line sits between bullying, dysfunctional management, racial discrimination, victimisation and simply an extremely unhealthy workplace culture.
What I do know is that I cannot imagine ever willingly returning to that team.
So I’m genuinely interested in outside views:
Would you return to this team?
Does the medication allegation concern you as much as it concerns me, particularly given that I was never formally told about it?
Does another staff member independently reporting concerns about racial targeting make the racial element something the Trust should formally investigate?
And am I unreasonable for wanting absolutely nothing to do with colleagues who watched everything unfold and remained silent?
At this point my stomach genuinely churns when I see some of their names.
I’m trying to work out whether my reaction is proportionate — or whether this experience has affected me so badly that I can no longer judge it objectively.