Woman's Hour - Race issues in the nursing profession. Oceanographer Dr Helen Czerski. Desert Island Discs Day.

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

Carol Cooper was awarded Nursing’s Diversity and Inclusion Champion of the Year award in 2019, she is a Regional NHS Head of equality, diversity and human rights and is the a Royal College of Nursing expert lead for BME Suicide Awareness, Equality, Diversity and Human Rights. She is also a Registered Nurse. She talks to Jenni Murray about race issues in the nursing profession and the way it's being responded to as a risk factor, as the NHS tackles Covid-19.More in our series celebrating the women who get things done – the Troupers. Today, Louise Kershaw, the treasurer of the Flixton Social Lites WI in Cheshire Plus ahead of World Oceans Day on Monday, the physicist, oceanographer and bubbles enthusiast, Dr Helen Czerski, talks about her time on board the Pelagia, a Dutch Oceanographic research vessel and her mission to perform a comprehensive health check on the North Sea.And as we celebrate Desert Island Discs Day on Radio 4, Danelle Pettman tells us about the track that’s made all the difference to her life in lock down. Presenter Jenni Murray Producer Beverley PurcellGuest; Carol Cooper Guest; Louise Kershaw Guest; Dr Helen Czerski, Guest; Danelle Pettman

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for Friday the 5th of June. Good morning. Next Monday will be World Oceans Day and there'll be a BBC4 documentary called Ocean Autopsy. What did Dr Helen Shersky find as she checked the health of the North Sea?

And how might nature fight back if we stop polluting with plastic, pharmaceuticals and toxic PCBs? On Desert Island Disstay, I'll reveal my book, my luxury and a couple of my chosen tracks. And Danielle Petman will explain her choice of music that's got her through her equivalent of a desert island, the lockdown. And the next of Women's Hour troopers, Louise Kershaw, is the treasurer of the Flickston Social Lights WI in Cheshire. Now this week's news has been led by the voices of the Black Lives Matter campaign following the violent death of an African-American man, George Floyd, under the knee of a white policeman on the 25th of May. At the same time, questions about the lives of black

and ethnic minority doctors, nurses, and other health care workers in the NHS have continued to be raised. The Equality and Human Rights Commission is to hold a statutory inquiry into racial inequalities highlighted by the pandemic. Black and Asian people have been disproportionately affected by the virus, both in terms of infection rate and mortality.

Last week, the Royal College of Nurses published a survey showing that nurses from the BAME community felt they had less protection than their white counterparts as shortages of PPE persisted. The RCN called the contrast between white and BAME nurses stark and deeply worrying. It was a concern that's been expressed more than a month ago by Carol Cooper, who leads on diversity within the NHS and was awarded Nursing's Diversity and Inclusion Champion Award in 2019. Carol, how surprising to you were the results of the RCN survey? They weren't surprising at all, to be honest with you, there is almost a kind of a living in the matrix experience where people know

what the situation is and know that there is a universal less favorable experience for BME people and staff and so kind of knowing what you know and then getting the evidence it's not a surprise it's useful confirmation because then it triggers something in the system which needs to acknowledge that but it's about how we move from acknowledgement then to doing something about it. Now you said in the interview you gave to Nursing Times that staff really feel there is a bias which obviously existed before but what you said is it's now influencing their being appointed to Covid-19 wards disproportionately. What's the evidence for that being the case? Evidence is always a difficult one. You know, I mean, one of the things about racism is that, you know, nobody walks around with a racism meter and is able to sort of pull it out and say it's happening.

What I do know is that this is what staff were telling me across the country. And I am in a unique position to be able to raise issues where sometimes staff in disenfranchised positions and less influential positions are not able to speak. And so that is what I do. And so the positioning of staff in terms of the workforce, being at the lower ends of the workforce would naturally position them at the front line. And if somebody is telling me that they are being appointed to COVID wards disproportionately at one end of the country and they're telling me at the other end of the country, then you get kind of a balance, a sense of actually this is not an isolated incident. Lots of people are saying this in lots of different places. Now awareness of inequality in the profession isn't new as I just

said but the NHS has had the workforce racequality Standard. That's been in existence for five years. What difference has that made? It's like asking what difference does a thermometer make? The Workforce Race Equality Standard is a diagnostic tool which gives organisations the ability to identify how they're performing in terms of areas which we know racism is likely to manifest in terms of the workforce demographics, in terms of the incidence of disciplinaries, in terms of discrimination and visible leadership in the NHS. What organisations have failed to do is to adequately respond to the evidence that they have been amassing over a five year period.

So in essence, organisations in the NHS have a five year dossier of evidence of how racism has manifested in their organisations. And what the Equality Act 2010 says is that when we find evidence of racism, of discrimination, that we are obligated by law to do something about it. And that something is deemed positive action. And that's a very difficult area for a number of people, because if you say positive action, it immediately throws up all sorts of polarised emotions and positions. And what happens is people then are almost stalled, paralysed into inaction because nobody wants to do it. But if there's evidence that BAME nurses are being disproportionately put onto dangerous wards,

why is somebody not immediately saying, hang on, we're putting these people at risk we have to balance it out equally i think the awareness of it when i raised it i think one of the responses across the nhs was for people to start speaking to certainly from the arms length bodies and regional positions starting to speak to staff. And the CNO BME Strategic Advisory Group did a lot of virtual engagement across the country speaking to staff. In response to that evidence, what happened was a risk assessment was advised across the country and a framework for that risk assessment was communicated.

And so organisations across the country are now putting in place risk assessments, which include the increased risk for BME staff and working through what they need to do in response to identifying that increased risk. How are they working those risk assessments? Because it must be really difficult to do a risk assessment based on ethnicity when the Public Health England report this week offered no explanation for why there is a disproportionate impact. How do you identify specific risks that need to be assessed? Well, this is the difficulty, and so we're almost feeling in the dark. It was interesting to me, and I didn't jump in initially because I wanted to see what people were going to put in there

in terms of identifying the risk. Is it race and ethnicity that is the risk? Does my race and ethnicity in and of itself make me more at risk of contracting and dying is the risk? Does my race and ethnicity in and of itself make me more at risk of contracting and dying from the virus? And I think how people have worked it is that they have made it a demographic risk assessment. So they've put in the comorbidities, they've assessed whether people, and it was interesting because people were putting things in around sort of houses of multiple generation.

And it's like, you know, are you talking multiple generation or are you saying multiple occupation? Because straight away, if you're talking multiple generation, we know that there are ethnic groups who are more likely to live in a multi-generation environment, but that the risk is multiple occupation. So people have sort of located the risk in those things and then perhaps added an increased score for your ethnicity. And that's across the piece. So the risk will be BME and maybe you'll get a couple of more points that would then throw you into an area that needs more protection. But we know that ethnicities are not equally impacted by this. And I think it's a huge challenge, this area. Race is a huge challenge for the UK. And the response is usually to ignore it. So we have an ethnic neutral approach to a number of things that we do,

which in and of itself is institutionally racist, because it denies the uniqueness of individual perspective, experience, access, and opportunity. And so we really need to put a lens on that responds to individuality. Carol, are you saying that within the NHS there has been a habit of assuming that somehow black lives matter less? Do you know if one of the things from my background is that we are socialized not just to hear what people say but we watch what they do. And if there isn't a correlation between what's being said and what's done, we become highly suspicious. And so all of the conversations about race, and in all of my life, I have never been involved in so many conversations about race,

those conversations have not led to equal action. And so, yes, the reality is black lives matter less. And that means whether you're an employee, that means whether you're a member of the community, but this is the UK experience. Black lives matter less. But as the evidence has been coming out, what sort of reaction have you had after you spoke out from BAME staff and white staff? I think there's no surprise in terms of the reaction.

So I have to say it's variable. So for white staff who are switched on to the fact that there is a institutional issue that works against BME staff, they immediately stood in a place of white fragility, which almost flips the script, you know, and sort of, well, where am I in all of this? How am I being viewed? Are people going to think I am doing this? BME staff, again, there was a variable picture. A lot of people said, thank you. Thank you for raising this. And there was some people because you have to remember, there's a whole load of adaptability that takes place in order to survive in an environment which is toxic to you. And racism is a public health issue. It's a it's a toxin that impacts on people with melanin. And so people make adaptations over a period of their lifetime or sometimes generations. And for some of them, surviving means

remaining invisible and silent. And so for those people, it was kind of, oh, my goodness, we're being exposed again in a negative light. live in the environment of racism, go to work in systems and institutions which render them to the lower echelons of those organisations perpetually across generations. Work needs to take place to support people to be able to, one, heal from the impact and two, to be able to have voice and agency in that space. How surprised were you that the Public Health England report appeared to make no mention of discrimination or racism? This is not new. The author of the report was commissioned by a body, which is an institution and sits within a political context. And so everything is going to be flavoured from that sort of political standpoint. thousand people that were engaged as part of that work identified strongly that discrimination played a part. That was omitted from the report and that was very unwise. Sometimes there is a move to think that withholding information is going to make the situation less inflammatory. Actually, it does the opposite, because what it confirms to us, there's a massive issue of trust between some communities and the powers that be.

And then when you withhold the evidence, when we have engaged with you and you withhold our evidence, you stifle our voices, you render us invisible. What you are saying again is black lives do not matter. We obviously asked for a Public Health England spokesperson to talk to us and we got this. On Tuesday PHE published the rapid data review and this has been published in full. This was contributed to by Professor Kevin Fenton alongside a wide variety of PHE colleagues. Professor Fenton has been engaging with a significant number of individuals and organisations within the BAME community over the past couple of months to hear their views, concerns and ideas

about the impact of the virus on their communities. The valuable insight he's gathered will inform the important work of the Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, is now taking forward. How do you respond to what they've said there? Again, it's spin. Essentially, I mean, I was involved in one of the forums that Dr. Fenton held. And one of the questions I asked was, given that we are aware that biological weathering is a very real phenomenon, racism, therefore, is a public health issue and as such should be considered within the scope of the report. And his response was, although it wasn't in the original scope of the report, via the engagement that took place, it was raised consistently and would feature in the

report. This is a delaying tactic in terms of then directing one BME person who was commissioned to write a report to another BME MP to sort this problem out. Both of those people sit within institutions and are powerless in a number of regards to take on the mammoth task of deconstructing institutional discrimination in the UK. Carol, I know you've described this as an important moment in an uncomfortable space. How much opportunity is there for real change in this moment? Do you know, Jenny, I attended the march in Birmingham yesterday, the Black Lives Matter march, and, you know, I am a veteran. I'm a middle-aged person. I was exceptionally moved by the number of young people that were present

and the passion with which they made their voices heard. There were young people there from all races, all backgrounds. And the signs that they held up were their personal testimonies. And some were saying Black Lives Matter, not just all lives, Black Lives Matter. You know, so don't switch it. Don't code switch. Black Lives Matter. There was a white young person who had a sign that said, I understand that I will never understand. However, I stand. And that was really important. Williams from Harvard University has done a lot of work around the empathy gap between ethnicities. And so that actually is quite wide.

Yesterday, I was heartened that that gap is closing amongst the younger generation because there was an understanding, a unity, an empathy that I've never witnessed in my lifetime. Carol Cooper, thank you so much for being with us this morning. And if you have experience of what Carol and I were talking about, we would love to hear your views. You can send us an email or of course you can send us a tweet. And Carol, thanks again. Now today is Desert Island Discs Day on Radio 4. For almost 80 years, castaways on the programme have imagined themselves marooned and alone and have selected the music they would need to comfort them. That imaginary isolation became reality for millions of us in recent weeks and so Radio 4 asked you to tell us about one piece of music

you've turned to during lockdown. You might have heard some of the stories and music earlier this morning on a special edition of Desert Island Discs. For Woman's Hour, Danelle Petman told us about the track that's made all the difference to her life in lockdown. So the song that I've chosen is Evan Finds a Third Room by Kerangbin. Yes. This song is really important to me because I had a miscarriage around a year ago back in May

and I was feeling a lot of grief and sadness and isolation and my partner played me this song after a few months and it was the first time that I felt joy in a really long time. Yes. I'm a clinical psychologist and I specialise in a really long time. I'm a clinical psychologist and I specialise in mother-infant interventions around postnatal depression, so I felt like I knew a lot about the more, I don't know, emotional and talking therapy-based things to do when you feel grief, but it was a surprise to me that music was the thing that really shifted my my stuckness with it it wasn't actually talking to someone or offloading my feelings it was just hearing a song so that was quite a revelation

yes this lyric was repeated over and over, just yes, yes. And it's just bizarre. It felt like it was giving me permission, like, yes, it's OK to feel happy again. Like, that's all right. Yes. I spoke to a lot of people about my miscarriage, friends, family. But the most kind of memorable moment was when I spoke to my paternal grandma and she talked about having a miscarriage herself, which I hadn't known about. And it was a very sad moment for her.

And it felt like a bit of a revelation. And she gave me a lot of praise for being open about it. It's a bit sad that it was a bit easier for me to talk about it, maybe because of my generation. There was just a lot of friends as well who'd kind of been through these kind of things and I wasn't so aware of that so it really opened up conversations with people. My partner works in the music industry and he comes across lots of weird and wacky music and often plays some to me and I don't always enjoy lots of them but he just stuck this song on.

It has a really funny music video, this kind of older Asian woman dancing really disinhibitedly with a hula hoop around these kind of urban scenes and it just it didn't make any sense and I think that's why it got through to me because it was just so it was just so funny and her like freedom of movement in the dancing just made me feel quite disinhibited I suppose. The only way I can really describe it is a metaphor of like when you've been really sick, physically sick and ill. And the first time you feel you notice, oh, I don't feel ill right this second. That feels so amazing.

So it was I could feel the smile coming across my face. I could feel happy and it had just been a really unfamiliar sensation in my body. I can't help but dance when I hear this song and me and my partner even made a silly dance video together and sent it to our friends who were all a bit worried about us at the time of the miscarriage just to kind of show them that we were getting back on track. This song means nothing's permanent, like even the good moods. But yeah, especially like if things are really bad, it's not forever. It can lift.

So in the corona times, for example, when I've been quite worried, I just listen to it and think, oh, it's not going to be forever. There will be a time when we look back and go, oh yeah, corona. And I'm looking forward to that. Yes, this is a good one. At the moment, I'm 22 weeks pregnant. I'm very pleased to say and just kind of feel very very smug and it's very it's easier to talk about the miscarriage in this situation I've noticed because you it feels like feels more comfortable because you feel

like things have turned a corner but it was very difficult when I was still trying yeah but now I'm pregnant and it feels really good. Danelle Petman sharing her song for Desert Island this day. My list up on social media includes Joan Byers' Diamonds and Rust, of course, Slipping Through My Fingers by ABBA and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. The book is Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook. And the luxury is eyeliner and a mirror so I can see what I'm doing.

Still to come in today's programme, the next in our series of troopers, the women who get things done. Today, it's Louise Kershaw, treasurer of the Flickston Social Lights WI in Cheshire. And the serial, the final episode of A Run in the Park. Now next Monday has been designated World Oceans Day. Two thirds of our planet is covered in water, split into five distinct oceans. And most of us are well aware of the damage human beings are doing to them. There are vast areas where plastic floats on the surface, coral reefs have suffered for some years,

and the creatures that live in the sea continue to be harmed. On Monday, BBC4 will broadcast a documentary called Ocean Autopsy. It will be presented by the oceanographer Dr Helen Shersky and the zoologist Dr George McGavin and their autopsy has concentrated its efforts close to home in the North Sea. Helen, why did you focus on the North Sea? Well obviously I would love to have gone everywhere but it wasn't possible even back then on the bbc budget so the north but the north sea is a very good place to pick because it's been affected by humans for a long time it is a shallow shelf sea which means that it's not part of the deep ocean you know out the huge

atlantic and pacific it is connected to the atlantic through the channel and through the north sea but humans you know it's got all these countries surrounding it. And through all of that time, humans have been migrating across it, farming next to it, putting things in it. So fishing in it, you know, all of those things. So if you want to go and look for one place where human influence has been strongest for the longest period, the North Sea is a pretty good, you know, petri dish to have a look

at. Now you did your research on board the Pelagia, a Dutch research vessel where you were collecting seawater from different depths. Let's just listen to some of what you found. Just one plastic bag in the ocean can disintegrate into over a million of these microplastic pieces, which then sink below the ocean surface. So what have we got on the screen here? So this is a tiny piece of microplastics, very high magnification, and on this we see a planktonic creature. Sometimes you see like a small entire ecosystem that is living on this. Microscopic creatures and plants called plankton

form the foundation of the ocean's entire food chain. And here in Helga's samples, they're living side by side with green flecks of microplastic. So, Helen, how harmful are these micro and nanoplastics? Well, we're still finding out, is the honest answer. People think about plastic in the ocean. You think about these pictures of beaches with big bits of plastic washed up. But honestly, the big bits are not really the problem.

They look ugly. Obviously, they're not a good thing. The problem is that sunlight breaks plastic down and you get these tiny, tiny pieces. And there's a few things that you know reasons they're difficult the first thing is they're basically the same size as lots of the life in the ocean so we're land-based animals we tend to look for big things with eyes but in the ocean lots of things are very very tiny and the plastics are basically the same size so they first of all things eat them thinking that they're, because most things that float around in the ocean of that size are food. But the plastics also accumulate chemicals, you know, other pollutants in the water column and act as vehicles for them, carrying them around and concentrating them.

And, you know, we're still looking, we're still trying to work out, first of all, where these microplastics are and how many of them there are because we do know that we can add up the amount of plastics we've put in the ocean and we can add up the amount that we've found and we haven't the amount that we haven't found is 99 so there's a lot of lost plastic in there what hope is there that there could be got rid of there was mention of some fungi that might be able to eat plastic without it being harmed. Yeah, so there are bacteria we know that can, you know, because we have things like, oil is a natural substance,

and so some creatures have got enzymes that could, you know, could eat that. So we know bacteria can a little bit, but fungi, that's a relatively new thing. So the chief scientist of the ship helga neiman uh from the uh you know dutch oceanographic institution his his work is looking at whether these fungi can break it down and it's and he does find them on tiny pieces of plastic and this is absolutely not it's really important to emphasize this is not a get out of jail free card um what it is is

life in the ocean being adaptable and finding a potential food source and either evolving or using the enzymes it's already got to eat it so so there may be fungi that was one of the outcomes from this expedition that he's one of the first scientists going to look for this kind of stuff and he could see fungi on tiny pieces of plastic and they do seem to be living on it they do seem to be incorporating it into their bodies so that is not the answer one of the things because these tiny plastics are the same size as everything in the ocean you can't filter them out you have to stop putting them in but it does seem potentially as though the fungi might be giving us a little bit of a helping hand but really you know the problem is ours the ocean

can't solve solve it all for us a lot of your work concentrates on bubbles what do bubbles teach us about the ocean i could tell from your voice it's very important that you know that bubbles are a very serious field of study um and and in the ocean they really are so so yes i study breaking waves and bubbles at the ocean surface and bubbles at other places in the ocean and they they do lots of things but the biggest thing really is they help the ocean breathe and that means that there's a lot of different gases in the atmosphere there's a lot of different gases dissolved in the oceans and bubbles are little vehicles that help gases go from one to the other. So, yeah, so I go out to sea on big research expeditions and trying to understand the number of bubbles and where they are and how they're formed and how they act as vehicles, how they help bring carbon dioxide down into the ocean during big storms, for example, or when they burst.

So when you, you know, if you hold a fizzy drink up under your nose, you'll feel it spitting tiny particles up your nose the white patches of foam on the ocean surface do exactly the same thing they spit particles upwards and they can carry things into the atmosphere and they that can affect clouds and so bubbles do sound like a fun topic and they absolutely are however they are filling you know they're in lots of places in the surface ocean and they are doing things they don't just sit there they're helping move things around they're in lots of places in the surface ocean and they are doing things. They don't just sit there. They're helping move things around. They're changing the way the ocean looks, the way it sounds, and they're moving gases and particles around. So it is. And it's an important climate change study as well, because if we want to understand how the engine of our ocean works, then things like the surface bubbles, it's really important to dig down into what they're actually doing and why.

I wasn't trying to minimise the importance of bubbles by the way I know how important your work is. Now George McGavin did a very sad autopsy on a porpoise what has he learned about the presence of toxic poisons in the water PCBs and pharmaceuticals that are harming the wildlife well this poor porpoise i mean so you know marine mammals do wash up dead whenever they do that uh there's an autopsy done to find out why they died and of course the marine mammal is swimming around in whatever's in the ocean and especially if they're a predator like a dolphin or a seal they're eating things and and that means that they're accumulating um all kinds of chemicals actually but particularly toxins and so and and some pharmaceuticals and so this this porpoise

you know it was starving when it died it was uh it was very thin it actually turned out to be pregnant i think and um it was but it had toxins in its blubber that had, well, the little blubber that it had because it was so thin that had built up over its lifetime. And so the problem with things like this is that, you know, it's not that any one thing necessary. You know, it's sad when an animal dies. It can be caused by one thing. But for these animals that are swimming around in our oceans, they're basically almost acting as samplers. They're swimming through everything. They're absorbing everything and they're getting every stress going so if it gets warmer they feel the warmer water if there's less food around they go hungry if there's toxins they get the toxins if there's noise pollution they get the noise pollution all

the stress that goes with that and so they're basically you know there's all these little stresses together are almost more important than any single one thing but yeah this this porpoise really was not in a good state and it did like many of the porpoises that wash up it did have very high levels of pcb's in its flesh and that's because that's what you know what they last for a long time where do they go well they just end up in the food chain and the top predators basically accumulate them all dr helen shersky thank you so much for being with us this morning. I have to say the programme is fascinating, and it starts on Monday night at nine o'clock on BBC4.

Thank you so much for being with us. And now the next in our series celebrating the women who get things done, the troopers. When Emma Hawley got in touch to nominate her friend Louise Kershaw, the treasurer of the Flickston Social Lights WI in Cheshire, a whole network of volunteering connections was revealed. We'll hear from Emma first, and then from Louise. our give me why group's got really strong links with the local food bank and lou has volunteered with them for quite a while now I know she's there every week and she does lots of different things for them and she's a

fantastic link between our two organizations Lou works really really hard as a volunteer and she really cares about the organizations that she's involved with she's a brilliant advocate for the WI and for the food bank and I think she's a really good example of someone who throws all her energy into supporting the things that she believes in. I'm blushing now. How did it make you feel? A bit embarrassed. Everybody usually is a bit embarrassed. Tell me about how you got involved with the WI first and then we'll come on to the food bank. I got involved with the WI because I was in a book club with a group of friends locally, a group of women. And one of them mentioned that there was a new WI opening locally and they were looking for women to join. So we agreed collectively that we'd go along and check it out.

And I was really blown away by it. I expected, you know, to arrive, we'd all have to sing Jerusalem and, you know, eat jam and cake and stuff and it wasn't, they were really quite radical women. I just thought, oh, here are my people, you know, they were women that really wanted to get things done and support other women and they just really wanted to connect with the community.

So we all joined and it started from that, really. It's about six or seven years ago now. Was it through the WI that you came to volunteer at the local food bank? Is that right? Yeah, it was actually, because a woman called Leslie came down to speak to us and just talk about the food bank. And it was quite a brief chat, just saying, you know, we'd said we'd like to collect for them. And she came down to explain how the food bank worked and what sorts of things they needed in terms of donations.

And I was just kind of really amazed by the size of the organisation in terms of the demand put upon it. And so I thought, well, I'll go down and have a look and just see if I can volunteer once a week and help shift tins of food around or help distribute to people that were in need. And I was surprised by how many people were using the food bank in the town I grew up in. Yeah, I was quite shocked by the scale of it and the fact that they needed many more volunteers and so I started volunteering initially once a week and

then it was twice a week and and then you can't say no when you know people need help I just felt I couldn't say no so I just got more and more involved and then eventually after a couple of years I was asked if I would be interested in being a trustee of the food bank and the food bank sadly was growing the demand upon it was greater and because I had a history of working in business I felt I could help with some of the structural and organizational internally you know the sort of systems internally and so that's what I started work on, you know, sort of managing all the volunteers and organising shifts and sort of communicating with some of our donors,

some of the, you know, the larger businesses that get involved with helping the food bank. You overhauled the food bank. Well, no, I didn't overhaul it. That would be blowing it up a little bit. I just, I tried to sort of make it a little bit more efficient because when you are dependent on amazing volunteers, people can only give what they can give. And that's not necessarily always what you need. You know, if you need someone to come on a Tuesday afternoon, but they can only do a Tuesday morning you're kind of bending over to

accommodate something else rather than your core value so yeah I just try to make the shifts a little bit more efficient to drum up more volunteers to get involved in training them to help them to understand how the food bank works because people think oh food bank works I'll go and volunteer which means I'll make a cup of tea for somebody and i'll sit and have a chat with them and they'll get a i'll do a bit of shopping from them from the shelves of food that we have and then off we'll go and that's not the case you know the food bank moves probably about 70 tons of food a year and moving 70 tons of food physically is big work and we need people that were strong and fit and healthy and willing to come along and basically move loads and loads of tins of food around because it's all

about organizing your stock and I was very lucky because the public in Stretford which is the town where the food bank is based are very very supportive of it And many of the women in the WI that I'm involved with either donate or they come and help volunteer using the skills that they have. Did you always volunteer in life? Was it something you did all the way through? I thought you might ask me that. And I was thinking about it. When did I start volunteering? I'd forgotten that many years ago when I was about 14, my family went to the local church and I was around that age where I was, you know, really not interested in going to church and rebelling

and saying, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do that. And I remember my mother saying to me, well, you don't have to go to church anymore, but there is somebody that you could help at church. And my mum used to volunteer. There was a wonderful old lady, Sylvia, and she had absolutely horrendous rheumatoid arthritis now I think she was probably in her 50s but at the time I thought she was an

old lady and she was very immobile but she wanted to stay in her own apartment and members of the church used to go and help her get up in the morning and have her lunch and put her to bed at night and there was obviously social services to help her as well but the church helped hugely and my mother used to go every Monday evening and have supper with her and get her ready for bed and put her to bed and she was just one of a team and my mum said I'd like you to join this team to go and help this lady and I got the shift Sunday mornings half past six which when I was 14 I didn't mind so much but when I was like 17 and crawling out the Hacienda I did but I did carry on doing it the summer that I must have been so drunk still when I went to see her but I started by doing

that by going getting Sylvia out of bed on a on a Sunday morning and then I'd crawl home and go back to bed and I did that for about four or five years. What do you get out of bed on a Sunday morning and then I'd crawl home and go back to bed. And I did that for about four or five years. What do you get out of volunteering? It's very similar, I would imagine, to the sorts of feelings people have about their work. It makes you feel valued, it makes you feel that you're contributing and it makes you feel that you're doing something positive.

So, yeah, it makes you feel good, I would say. You know, I very much believe in community I live in a great town with lots of wonderful people and lots of people that are very community-minded and I like being in that town because of that I think even more than ever we need that spirit Louise Kershaw spoke to Laura Thomas and there'll be more troopers next week. We had a huge amount of reaction to the interview with Carol Cooper.

Dr Rageshri Dharayawan said, superb interview, we need to improve health outcomes for our black and ethnic minority patients. Guppy said, I agree, it was so good, waiting for us to move away from race as an identifier, but I think the whole discussion on at PHA UK and biological weathering were excellent and so needed. Please, more voices like Carol Cooper.

Important to have real, experienced, no-spin views that matter. Thank you to her, said Gail. And Patricia said, Carol Cooper for Prime Minister. Thank you, Jenny Murray and Woman's Hour, for that excellent interview with Carol Cooper, saying what needs to be said and doing what needs to be done. Brilliant. Elizabeth said,

I'm just listening now to the talk about more ethnic staff being assigned to COVID ward duties. This is probably because they're better trained to the equipment to be used than the white British nurse. The ethnic staff have usually attained more qualifications. I had this discussion at least a month ago with a senior lead nurse manager responsible for a special type of unit up and down the country. She has said that the white British nurses won't work. She's of ethnic origin herself.

I'm also a long-time ex-nurse. I'm listening to your programme, said someone else. I feel really annoyed with your speaker. I work in the NHS on the front line. I totally disagree with her views. I've never experienced any sort of racism within my work and never seen anyone put in any position they're not comfortable with. I don't think the colour of a person's skin has any influence on which task they're given. It's purely their ability. Where is she getting this information? I think she's just stirring up bad feeling within the NHS. This is being racist, in my opinion. I'm not giving my name, but I'm fuming. Carol Cooper says that people of her ethnicity are very aware of whether people actually match actions with words.

My experience of British people is that they often say yes politely when they've decided not to do whatever was asked, and that came from Barbara. Jill said, It's not just racism that occurs in the NHS. I worked in the NHS for 40 years and witnessed and experienced many incidences of bullying as a student and as a nursing sister. Most nurses and doctors are lovely,

but as throughout society, there are those who shouldn't be allowed to get away with such bad behaviour. The angels label is a misnomer in quite a lot of cases. And Richard said, My wife, as the sister in her ward, allocated tasks to various people. Some were BME and equally qualified to local nurses. I noticed that she was more likely to choose a BME nurse for certain tasks.

Was my wife a racist? I asked her why she chose them and she told me because they can do it best. But listening to the BBC output, especially Radio 4, I think she must have been a racist and not just an excellent nurse and manager. Thank you so much for all your comments. Now do join me tomorrow for weekend Woman's Hour. We'll be asking how are attitudes towards dating changing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, how disabled women who are shielding at home because they're considered extremely clinically vulnerable to COVID-19, are finding this experience. And the creator and one of the stars of The Other One, a new comedy about a girl called Catherine Walcott

and another girl called Catherine Walcott, they're half-sisters who had no idea the other existed until their father died. So do join me tomorrow afternoon, just after four o'clock. See you then. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this?

What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.