The NHS is taking action to tackle antisemitism after a government-ordered report found that Jewish patients and staff face “routine ostracism” in the service. Anti-Jewish hatred in the NHS means some patients hide their identity and staff “suffer in silence”, a review by Lord Mann, the government’s adviser on antisemitism, has found.
Moves to combat it will see NHS staff’s freedom to display political symbols on their uniforms restricted and bosses of the service’s 205 health trusts in England given antisemitism training. Antisemitism is so rife in the NHS that it threatens its basis as a universal service, with Jews not confident they will receive proper treatment, Mann will say in his 60-page report, which will be published on Thursday.
He will outline how some Jewish patients have decided not to seek treatment or put off having important care as a result of antisemitism and highlight “shocking examples of intimidation and abuse within the health service”. Wes Streeting commissioned Mann last year when he was health secretary to investigate antisemitism in the NHS after reports that several doctors had made comments displaying hatred of Jews.
Two doctors, Manoj Sen and Mohammed Asif Munaf, have recently been struck off the medical register and banned from practising medicine in the UK because of antisemitic behaviour. Another doctor, Rahmeh Aladwan, is due to go on trial at Bristol crown court next year on charges of inviting support for Hamas – a proscribed organisation – stirring up racial hatred and using threatening and insulting words at a protest.
She is alleged to have posted “free the world from Jewish supremacy” on social media, and to have posted that she did not condemn Hamas or its 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, but did “condemn the existence of Israel”. Mann’s report sets out changes the NHS will now push through as an urgent priority to become a “responsible and inclusive employer”.