BAME staff and microaggressions

Just prior to COVID-19, my Trust's new people officer was looking for support in a range of executive ambassador roles, I expressed an interested in becoming an ambassador for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff.

This week I received a message from a newly qualified nurse whom I had met when she was a student nurse. She asked to meet with me to discuss our approach on ‘BAME and microaggression’—a term that I had not previously heard. As an individual who had been at the receiving end of microaggression, she asked me if I would be willing to engage in a reverse mentorship approach.

I have previously written about reverse mentoring (Foster, 2019) and found that, while most of what is published about the subject reflects on how it enables engagement with younger staff, one trust introduced a reverse mentoring programme to give senior managers genuine insight into what it was like for frontline BAME staff (Stephenson, 2016).