Black lives matter

Holly: I'm going to allow Natasha and Hong-Anh to introduce themselves so that they can tell us about the work that they do and why they're involved in this um conversation

Natasha Howard: Okay, would you like me to go first Holly?

Holly: Please do it yeah.

Natasha Howard: Okay so hi everyone. I’m Natasha Howard I’m Library and Knowledge Services Manager at North East London NHS Foundation Trust. I know many of you don't know me. Some of you are dialing in so you can't see me. I’m not black I’m mixed race or biracial so I’m roughly half black Afro Caribbean and half white English. My mum was born in Jamaica and in the 70s the government paid for her to come over here to train to be a nurse. She did her training in Bath and then she went to Essex and that's where she met my dad. So I've always thought of myself as being half Essex, half Jamaican.

I'm descended from enslaved people and to their enslavers, but I’m not a spokesperson for black people that monolithic group that seems to exist in your imagination. I want to be upfront about this because we all need to be able to acknowledge the privileges that we have and I need to acknowledge the privilege the advantage that comes from having this lighter skin - what some people call proximity to whiteness - and it doesn't end there. My other great privileges include a comfortable upbringing and fantastic education. We still have grammar schools in Essex and I passed my 11 plus I went to grammar school and then I went to King's College London.

Now partly because of where I grew up and partly because I’m fortunate to have a wonderful extended family who are very loving, I’ve never experienced the kind of overt violent um aggressive racism that many people would think of as being proper racist. I’ve always known I was a target as a child my dad told me to be careful when we were in shops, keep my hands visible because people would think I was going to shoplift because I’m brown. Even now if I go into a shop I always get a basket if I can't get a basket I walk around like this like I’m waiting on tables in my hands.I just don't even think about it when I was 6 my mom told me I'd have to work twice as hard as everyone else to get anywhere because of the colour of my skin. At the time I really wasn't that bothered because I knew I was a hard worker, and I was very bright so I just got on with it. For a long time I naively believed that we lived in a meritocracy and that part of hard work would pay off. That our society was post-racial perhaps there was some pockets of ignorance, that they are very isolated.

Life started to change when my son was born 6 years ago. He was 2 weeks early and we were kept on the postnatal ward so he could have IV antibiotics twice a day. After we've been there for a few days, I knew something wasn't right and I kept asking the midwives if he was okay. They said he was fine. His nappies were weird and they said they were normal. It was only when it came to a weekend night shift and an Indian nurse was starting the neonatal unit and doing his IV antibiotics, and she said to me your baby's a little bit jaundiced. I’ve  taken a sample to check and a few hours later everything kicked off because the results showed that he was really really jaundiced really dehydrated in a bad way. He was whisked off to the neonatal unit and it was nearly 2 weeks before I could take him home. It was 6 years ago and he's fine now, but that's just one example of how racism and health care affected outcomes. The concerns of this very articulate educated women were repeatedly ignored and the white staff didn't know how to support children for non-white babies.

I guess I started to wake up to reality. I started doing more reading I soon realised that I had this duty to leverage my privilege to facilitate change. I have engaged with my trust's long-standing ethnic minority network and I’m now a interview colour representative for the network and also strategic ambassador like we know.

Librarianship is  white. Until our profession reflects the communities we serve, we're not going to be equipped to meet their needs. It's going to take a while to change those figures, but I think in the meantime we all have a duty to participate ourselves on EDI issues in the broadest sense and how they manifest in our work and then we can start to act. So thanks for taking the time to engage with us on this.

Holly: Thanks Natasha. Hong-Anh? Are you there? Hold on, she seems to have disappeared. There you are.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Sorry, I’m Hong-Anh Nguyen. I am the Library Service Manager at the Kings Fund so I guess I work in a health library. Probably not in the kind of way that most people think about health libraries because our collection is focused on health and social care policy and management. So like Natasha said and so eloquently said, I think one of the things that is really important for me to clock in my introduction is that this session is about Black Lives Matter and, as you can see, I’m not black. I am I would identify as a woman of colour, person of colour BAME all of those are like words that I might use to describe myself just depending on the context. Or South East Asian or Vietnamese. The kind of experience of discrimination or othering that I experienced are very different to the experiences of Black or Asian or other ethnic minority people. I think it's just really important to kind of highlight that because I think what black lives matter is really highlighted is that BAME isn't like a monolith. It's an umbrella term that kind of covers a lot of experiences and for me how that showed up in my life is that the southeast Asian community tends to be kind of part of what we call in this country like the model minority. You might have also heard it referred to as like the good immigrant as there is it kind of shows up as like an expectation that you're going to kind of be very perform really well academically. That you will go into certain professions so like being a doctor or being a pharmacist or being a lawyer. And I think it's it's about kind of putting that identity in a box and making expectations of how they perform but when Black Lives Matter when it kind of came to the attention of the world again over the past few weeks one of the things that I really kind of thought that the way that model minorities are used as a tool of white supremacy. Like as a way to kind of oppress like other minority groups. So again there is like layers of privilege there that we have to think about. I guess the other thing I want to say is that my experience of talking and thinking and doing stuff around equality diversity and inclusion, it's informed by my lived experience but it's really garnered from my professional experience so I’m involved in a lot of the King's Funds diversity inclusion program and so I co-lead on a lot of the work that we do, and I’m involved in lots of the initiatives so I’m part of the reverse mentoring program. We introduced a positive action graduate trainee post, for example, so yes so I guess I guess my disclaimer as it were would be that - and I’m sure Natasha would agree with this - is that while we have experience in this field, we don't have all the answers. There is no silver bullet for solving the issues that we're going to be talking about because if there were, we wouldn't be having this discussion today so I think it's more to say that we're just sharing our experiences of how our journey has been so far in working in this area.

Holly: Thank you, that's great. What we've done is we've taken the questions that you all are on Slido and we've sort of grouped them together thematically because there were quite a lot of questions that went together nicely so I’m going to ask Natasha and Hong-Anh these questions, and then they're going to have a discussion and during that discussion if you want to make any further questions or comments please use the chat function.

So let's kick off with our first question how can library staff regardless of level or role affect positive change and influence upwards where resistance is being met?

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Tricky isn't it? This is a really good question and I’m sure one that both of us really relate to in our experience so far. I guess I guess resistance is often felt downwards but resistance can be found in like all directions within an organisation so it can be felt from your peers, it can be felt from your managers, from directors, senior managers - so what I always think is that everyone is responsible for something right you. You all have a job description you're all responsible for delivering an element or aspect of your service, making certain decisions about your service. That is power, so you have the power to make decisions that ultimately add up into change if everyone kind of thinks about their power consciously so if you're a cataloguer, for example, you might have the ability to kind of lead a discussion and lead a piece of thinking about do the class do the indexing terms we use reflect really the languages used nowadays, around gender identity, around race. You know that's that's one thing that you can do. You can't do everything but the things that you can do are change. So that would be my first thought on this.

Natasha, what do you think?

Natasha Howard: Yeah I think some different examples. I’ve seen of training sessions as well if you're helping people learn to search databases you can use examples that speak to different aspects - whether they're things to do with race or things to do with issues like domestic violence and that kind of thing and so just even from including those examples when you're saying people it's just starting to broaden out the thinking a little bit more. The other one I was thinking of is about sharing good practice from elsewhere like maybe your boss doesn't want to do it, but there's nothing to stop you talking about what everyone else is doing or what someone else is doing and you know if it gets talked about enough there will be, there will be that pressure to do something.

Yeah and also I mean particularly for the NHS there's an aspect of accountability as well. So you know you've got the workforce race equality standard which which are the measures that you know are applied nationally across the service in terms of measuring, race disparity in the NHS and that's not so there are kind of things that the NHS is required to do. Standards that they require to meet and so is there any way that you can kind of train your argument in terms of like this link to a strategic priority - it might lead to a strategic equality in the NHS so you might link it to race data. This is particularly personal when you're thinking about on workforce like when you're thinking about the makeup of your team, how people progress, how you support career progression because the NHS is actually quite diverse, but as you as you travel up that diversity doesn't translate in terms of race. You know there are also kind of strategic priorities that your organization will have that. Your trust will have, I’m pretty sure, that all NHS trusts will have like some sort of EDI strategic objectives, and what what are those how can you kind of link it into those. Like you need to think about all of those things to kind of help make the business case. Almost you kind of have to treat everything like it's a business case because the moral code alone sometimes won't win the day so sometimes you have to you have to put your librarian head on and do a bit of research and say here's the data, this is why we should do it. So there's lots of data out there for example about why not diversifying your workforce will result in you know less a less rich pool of talent and then that has an economic impact on your organisation. You need to kind of yeah put your research hat on and find what the what the kind of data is, and what the argument is to do this kind of thing whatever the change is.

Natasha Howard: Another one I was going to suggest is about, if you just have an ethnic minority or a black staff network it might be useful to link in with them because as Hong-Anh says - there's strategic priorities around these issues. You know if you're chair of your network is saying where's the EDI stuff in the library that's going to perhaps carry a bit more weight then and you sending it to your boss maybe.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah that's a really good shout out. Definitely yeah find yours, what is your peers in your organization. Find your supporters like you're trying to do things that you're just more distant. You're not the only one who's trying to make this change so you need to try and find the other people and join up, and be strategic about it. Yeah so if for example you want to kind of diversify your collection, but you know there are budget constraints and there's a bit of resistance about it. You can argue that it's good for self well-being. You argue that it links into kind of like greater thinking around health inequalities and how that interacts with race inequality, and that's actually quite an important dimension to speak about because at a health policy level that's something that people are starting to think about. You need to kind of cast your net quite broadly.

Holly: That's great. I think that's that's a lot of practical steps that people can take to start thinking about how they affect that positive change upwards. I don't think we've got anything that's come from on the chat on that topic so she'll move on to our next question. So and this has been a big one we had lots of discussion about this on on Slido. What does it mean to decolonize a library in a healthcare context?

Natasha Howard: Okay, so decolonization as I understand it is about sort of changing the focus from things that have been largely built and designed around cisgender white specific male. White people and making things, yeah, more diverse so in our health care library I think there's lots of ways that we can do it. We can talk about collections but we've also talked about the training aspects as well, raising awareness to those kind of examples. Yeah the things that we've got over about the lack of diversity of images and stuff. That's really topical at the moment. I don't know people have seen on Twitter, there is a student at Saint George's University who has written a book about recognizing clinical signs in black and brown skin. He's done it as part of a student project. He's a medical student and this is being hailed as a big thing because it's a first and that's kind of incredible when you think about it. But this should be down to the unpaid labour of a medical student to reduce this kind of resource, but these are the kind of things that we're thinking of. These pictures, these resources should be more available, and when we say decolonized we're not just talking about the race agenda -we're talking about gender, we're talking about lgbtq+ issues as well which have a knock-on effect in health and health outcomes. So it's really thinking wisely interrogating our collections what voices are being heard, what voices aren't being heard, and in the collections and in the terms that we use as Hong-Anh said earlier the index terms that we use as well.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah I think the example that you use of the medical students who've put together this resource, I mean that absolutely shouldn't be something that someone has taken on as unpaid labour. I guess my challenge to us as the profession we have significant economic power it comes to publishers. For example, what could we do to affect change as a whole profession of health care librarians? When we're thinking about what's missing so we know that in dermatology there are there's no diversity in how skin conditions show up on different colour skins because they do present differently.

A really pertinent example of this at the moment is in COVID-19 actually. So one of the symptoms of COVID-19 is a rash. About 20% of COVID-19 patients present with this, but all the exams like the majority of the examples - photographic examples - we have of how this rash looks is on white skin, and there are very little examples - photographic examples - of how this looks on Asian skin on Black skin. And so it looks different and this might be a crucial thing that is being missed in a certain section of population and, we already know that outcomes and COVID-19 for particular ethnic groups is very different than it is in white groups Actually, the COVID-19 tracking app that is developed by Zoe is the one that's been used quite a lot in the UK at the moment. I’m sure a lot of people on this call can say they're every day on it and they put out a call for people to send in pictures if if they had experienced the rash weren't from a caucasian background, so we could have examples of that.

Yeah it has kind of real world consequences this kind of stuff, and what Natasha said as well about it applying to kind of other characteristics as well. So for anyone who's read like the Caroline Criado-Perez's Invisible Women, there's quite a lot there about how medical research has historically erased women from a lot of trials, and consequently our understanding our medical model of understanding some conditions is based on how it presents in men for example. It's about that kind of real world consequence so I think for us as healthcare librarians as information professionals we need to get ahead of a curve right we need to understand where the gaps in our knowledge are and be conscious of that. Bear that in mind when we carry out literature searches, when we think about our collections and you know that's on our speed.

Holly: That's great, thank you. We've actually had some a really good questions. Shakira has shared the information on the Mind the Gap book that you were talking about from Saint George's if you were interested in that. We can add that link into our resources list actually can't we

Natasha Howard: Yeah lovely thank you That would be great.

Holly: So Camilla has asked, when we do literature searches on for example dermatological conditions and darker skin - sometimes it seems that there is very little research or no research. Is there an organization or somewhere we can report these research gaps to? Somewhere that is able to pass on the message that most research is needed on x y and z.

Natasha Howard: Wow that's, if there is a place - yes great question - we we should try and find out. I wonder if they're in, yeah I wonder if, NIHR is a good place to report that. So that's the National Institute for Health Research they're the main funding body for NHS research and they give out grants for research conducted in the NHS. I think one of their remits is to try and correct like gaps in the knowledge in the evidence, so that might be one that comes to mind but that's definitely something we should go away and look at and we might add that to the reading list.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: I’m wondering if if if some of these,like some more say like Runnymede Trust or whatever, might have some ideas as well.

Natasha Howard: Yeah some other - like that it's a think tank isn't it - so yeah yeah that's a really good question with action to take away.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah and they’re really well placed to kind of spot that kind of thing and report it.

Holly: Sorry just flicking back and forth through the chat and I’m using myself. There's been another suggestion here from Suzanne Wilson she says the James Lind Alliance and she's put the link in which we will add to our resources pack, thank you. Susanne that's really okay. Should we move on to our next question? So how can libraries promote their EDI collections and encourage engagement with this topic through the resources that they provide?

Natasha Howard: So this is a great question and I think you know

Hong-Anh Nguyen: I don't think it's a case of doing anything extra over and above what you already do in your services, and in the services that you provide. It's about rethinking all of those activities you do with a different lens. Thinking about it through the EDI, the EDI lens. And so like Natasha's already given a great example of this in terms of like things about training. You know like could you if you host a journal club, for example, could you use that journal club model and use it to host discussions around diversity where you you could use not only like clinica like clinical research but you could use maybe like a think piece that is about an aspect of diversity and inclusion that you think. It's really useful to have a conversation about, and so you give people that reading, and then it's up to you you have the physical space. And you can kind of host the space to have that discussion because one that kind of provides lifelong learning continuous learning opportunities which is, you know, that's our jam. That's what we do, and it's continuing to engage people with your servers who may maybe they don't need to use the library in their day-to-day job, but this is like again proving that this the service library can be relevant to their professional development in a different way.

Natasha Howard: Yep yes I really like that lifelong learning idea and I think that some of the questions specifically about Black History Month, and stuff I think sometimes we sort of think oh you know Black History Month or 5 months is it really relevant to what we're doing well. Actually, I think these are things that many of us need to learn more about and it will benefit us not just in our work, but in our home lives as well. So I think it's a really good opportunity to have those conversations and also you know it can be fun as well. It doesn't have to be really serious you know the one about activity ideas for Black History Month. Well yeah you could get people to read that you could also get people to watch a film, you know, a podcast that kind of thing. Have a comedy sketch even, have a discussion about it.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah yeah yeah and that's a great point about like yeah it doesn't it doesn't have to be prefaced. We had Pride Week at the Fund recently and one thing we did was to host a quiz, but the quiz was an educational quiz. All the questions were centered around LGBT history so it was educational as well as a social activity.

Natasha Howard: One of the questions about encouraging people to join in one of the phrases that our ethnic minority netweok uses is opening events out to everybody. We did this yesterday to reflect the makeup of the organisation. So we went 60 percent white staff, 40 percent BAME and they pretty much got it. Pretty much the stats debate they were doing a Slido on it. Yeah so I think sometimes people think things aren't for them so you have to have that. That's something we're doing in recruitment, isn't it? We want applications from underrepresented groups. We're saying for these kind of activities, as well.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah, yeah and I think that's that's a really good point Natasha, is that often like EDI stuff attract people who know they're attracted to it because it reflects their lived experience. And so, you know, if them people want to get involved because it is really about directly influencing change to make their own experience of the workplace better. Or if can be people who are kind of, you know, really allied to the cause and quite active in that space. I think for people who are newer to the conversation it can feel, it can feel scary to join that, and when there's there might be a gap in where they are on their journey, and where other people are on their journey. And, you know, often people don't want to get involved in stuff like this because they're scared of saying the wrong thing, or they're scared that it's not a space for them so being really explicit about what we expect is really important and saying, you know, we expect everyone to get involved in this because this is a problem, not only for black and brown people to solve. It's a problem for everyone to solve.

Holly: I think that fits in really well to another question we have that is on the Slido around being an ally. So somebody had recently taken part in ally training provided by the Trust LGBTQ plus network and they wondered what your thoughts were on staff becoming an ally?

Natasha Howard: Oh that's really, that's really timely question because we the call I was talking about just now was brought out of the LGBT plus network and allies. And I think it can be really powerful as long as we're clear on what the ask is and one of  the slides we had on the call yesterday was what an ally is not, what you mustn’t do, and then they were giving and then there was another slightly different thing to do. I’ve heard this from our LGBTQ network when they launched their allies scheme, they gave everbody this nice little badge, and they've sort of been there a few months long. It's not just about the badge, we actually need people to do stuff so one good thing on our call yesterday, is we had all our senior integrated care directors and our chief executives even making pledges that they are going to demonstrate that allyship, and so they're going to be held accountable by the network, by the organisation, for the things they said on the call yesterday. On the call yesterday, one thing we haven't got on the reading list that we should add - Yvonne Coghill - who was with the red team. I'm not sure if she still is but she's still obviously operating this area, she ust did a 7 days of allyship slide thing that's been going around on Twitter. That was really good. It's just one page, we should add that to the reading list. 

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah actions yeah yeah and I think you know, I think the key for the key thing for me in terms of allyship is that you need to be active at allyship to kind of signal that you're for the cause is great, but we need to go one further. We need we need white people to step up and actually help us push this boulder up the hill because if it's only people from an ethnic minority background pushing that boulder up the hill then you know if you think about it you're perpetuating the same problem. It's unpaid labour it's work on an underrepresented group to fix the problems that have been created by a dominant group. Allyship can look like a lot of different things. Yeah it can look like personal commitment. It can look like ou know being the person to take on the difficult conversation so that your colleague from an ethnic minority background doesn't have to. If someone has said something in a meeting that you know doesn't sit well with youmaybe that's like a really great thing you can do is to kind of call that out. So that it's less of a fraught conversation for the person who has the least power in that situation. Yeah so it's just about thinking about what you can do. One of the questions on the Slido is about you know are they good examples of a Trust implementing training where people can feel the lived experiences of stuff. I say another kind of really important thing you can do as an ally is to not rely on people having to kind of remind some of their traumatic experiences so that you can learn. There's a lot out there already, you know, there are people there are talented authors, podcasters, screenwriters actors who have all kind of created stuff that help you understand what that lived experience is. It's a tough ask to ask your colleagues to share that because it can be risky you know like if you experience the workplace in a different way and then you're being asked to kind of disclose how different that is, and how bad that is for you. That's a really tough place to be put in and just to say yeah one thing that I’ve added to the reading list is that the King’s Trust have recently published a piece of research which includes some data of that like that is anonymised so that helps give you a flavour but there is plenty out there that's written on this and specifically in the NHS context as well.

Natasha Howard: Just a couple of things out there Hong-Anh. Yeah we shouldn't be asking our colleagues to relive their horrible experiences but, if you're going to pay somebody who does this for a living to you know facilitate those conversations, or just interpret that for you, then there are several good people out there who can have those conversations and take that because they're paid to do it, rather than your staff having to do it. The other one is I just recently came across, and it's on the reading listm this thing called Hexitime? I don't know if people have seen it? It's like a time banking thing and they have running a campaign about supporting BAME colleagues because several of my um several of my white mostly male colleagues have signed up for that this week that offered to do things like interview, coaching and mentoring for more junior new qualified allied health professionals. For example so that might be something you think you that you could do and I'll also be outside your work as well you know actually I’m so nobody can stop you from doing it if you want to offer a mentor or give interview practice for somebody.

Holly: Thank you I think I think you've kind of gone into some of these examples that this next question has asked, but Richard has said - what does it mean to help as an old white middle class guy I’m aware I don't want to patronize or mansplain to people? What concrete things can I do?

Natasha Howard: I think the fact that you know the word mansplain means that you're probably you're on the right lines there. I that I always appreciate when my older

white colleagues do that is when they say my name when I’m not there or when they reference work that I’ve  done which will bring me into a conversation about something I can help with. That there's people you can do that for.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah um like I said before you can be the person to have a difficult conversation too so harking back to one of the earlier questions about resistance if people are trying to make change about something chances are that as a white white man people might listen to you more than they do to other people, than they do to a woman of colour. So you know you can utilize your privilege for good.

Holly: Thanks. That was great. Okay so this is a big topic as well actually. It came up, what should library collections relating to equality, diveristy and inclusion or BAME groups be called? What langauge would be most appropriate and least offensive?

Natasha Howard: So we've put some stuff on the reading list about the different terms, haven't we Hong-Anh? Because there's there's a lot to unpick with them.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah there is. We've actually been having this conversation quite a lot at the Fund recently. Partiallty I think because we've realised that one of the reasons why we what the consequence of us having historically not done that much work about it is that we don't have the confidence to talk about it because we feel like we don't have the language. And language is so often a barrier in terms of people trying to get involved in this because people don't want to offend.

So like I think the key thing here is that there is, this is not going to be very helpful, but there is no right or wrong, so I'm fine with the term BAME being used. Other people aren't. I'm okay with it being used in certain contexts, so I think it's I think where you use terms. You have to use them meaningfully and ensure that you've put some thought into it so BAME is okay if what you mean is actually Black Asian and Ethinic Minority . BAME is not okay if you are only referring to a few of those groups. For example, language is loaded and it just means that it means something different to everyone else. So I think as long as you make the decision and you've done your research and you're able to say why you've made that decision that is the best approach to this.

So an example is at the Fund we used capital b for Black and we had a discussion about what that why that is and because you know Black is not an ethnicity, but there is a political dimension to it in terms of it's, you know, a social construct that is recognise so it is used with captial b. But there's also discussion about whether you should also capitalise the w in white. The captial in w in white is sometimes associated with white supremacy, but then also if you don't capitalise it then it plays into that whole thing that they are also holders of race. Race is not only held by people who aren't white, so it's really complex and messy. But just do your research and figure out where you fall on it, and why you've made those decisions so that if you get called out on it if people want to know why you've made that decision, you can have a meaningful conversation about it.

Holly: Thank you.I don't know Natasha? Do you have anything to add to that?

Natasha Howard: No I suppose I might just say something about a question saying about collections related to EDI or BAME groups. I  think I like the idea more of having an EDI collection because you know we're thinking about this holistically everything about all trying to think about all the detective characteristics. And it would be nice to make sure you have stuff covering all of those different label groups as well and i don't know maybe it depends on how big your collection is? Maybe, I don't think I'd have enough to have separate reading this drawer.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Okay so maybe you've gone. I think that's a really good point as well because it takes into that idea of intersectionality as well. So you know we should be thinking about all the characteristics and all these different characteristics don't sit in silos. It's really important to think about it holistically.

Holly: Fab right, we have some chats going on and some of these relate a bit back to some of the previous questions. So I'm just going to go through them as they've cropped up okay. So William has asked would you like diversity engagement assessed by Health Education England, for example, as part of the quality impact outcome framework assessment?

Natasha Howard: Do we, are we thinking about equality and diversity of library knowledge services as part of the new is that what we're saying?

Holly:  I think so yeah being specified whether it's workforce or library services stuff but um I suppose either or both.

Natasha Howard: Well I think we we are in the refresh of the Knowledge for Healthcare. You've got diversity is much more explicit in there in the driver diagrams and things. Oh I’m not sure I’m not sure I have alibrary with my library manager hat on. I think the quality improvement outcomes is big enough and the other thing is like Hong-Anh talks saying you know we shouldn't be doing any new stuff this stuff should become mainstream and should be part of, you know, the way that we make sure that our collections are comprehensive and addressing all the relevant issues for our organisations.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: No I don't think so I I think it depends, so I I think I think it depends on how we want to encourage libraries to pay attention to this so one way to do it is through that means. I don't work in an NHS library so I have no idea of what it means to kind of do the quality framework assessment and what that might add if we we add that in it but I think there are other ways to try and encourage people like libraries to pay attention to EDI in their services. It doesn't just have to be through this and if we if it was included it shouldn't be only through that either.

Holly: Yeah I I think I agree with you. I attended some training yesterday actually on the legalities of equality, diversity and human rights and they made a really interesting point that we can be using our equality impact assessments on things like developing new teaching programs to ensure that we're checking that everything is inclusive. Ae've explored all options when we're doing those things so that might be something to think about for us as well.

Okay back to the chat. There's lots of things going on so Shakira has said how to navigate these conversations with colleagues. As a black woman I almost anticipate ignorant comments and don't feel it is my duty to emotionally drain myself. Should just I be more involved?

Natasha Howard: No I think you need to be the priority. I thing is you need to look after yourself. If you don't feel you can do it in the moment or ever then then I don't think it's for you to take it on. I don't think I’m talking to some older colleagues the group I I was having a conversation with the - I don't think she's on the call today - but she was sort of saying you know we were doing this work 20 years ago in libraries then it kind of dropped off and I come back and she's like I just want to get on with my job. So I think it's for those who have the energy right now me and Hong-Anh got a bit of energy right now to do this work and then you know maybe we'll step back and some other people will take it up in a couple of years.

I'm sorry you have to anticipate those comments and it's just it's just draining because I think speaking for myself I don't want to be talking about this I just like to get on with my life and just be me but you know we can't get away from it and yeah.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah I would totally agree it's yeah you need to make the best decision for you and if you if you don't want to engage in those conversations don't. If it's ithe emotional burden of it is too much, if it takes away from you progressing in your career, using time for your own career progression for other things in your life that are valuable no don't do it. You know like I think I saw a tweet the other day which was about kind of imagine all like the great black writers if if they if racism didn't exist - what would their work be about? But as it is they had to devote their intellectual energy to writing about this stuff. You do not have to devote your energy to that if you want to then that's great but as we've said before the push is not for it's for everyone to pick up this baton. No one can do this work indefinitely and yeah I like Natasha like this is not this is not necessarily what I want to be spending my time on but here we are

[Laughter]

What I will say is that it's not like I don't get anything from this work so it's been really developmental for me being involved in this work. It's really helped me to build skills and stuff that maybe i wouldn't have gotten the chance to at this point in my career in a library role, so my ability to kind of influence upwards has really been honed by being involved in EDI work, in thinking kind of really strategically. For example I probably wouldn't be able to do that unless I’ve got up to the next rung of the ladder in my career so there are benefits but it's up to you to decide., what the trade-off is between like your emotional mental health because it is draining and whether you want to kind of progress your career in that way and through this channel.

Natasha Howard: Yeah so i'll just come in again. They're Hong-Anh just to echo about what you're saying the work what I'm starting to do now with the ethnic minority network being a strategic ambassador means, you know, I’m in contact with all these much senior members of staff. One there that keeps from and really enjoying getting to know them as well and the other thing we're talking about careers is that it's only in the last couple of years I’ve started talking about these issues and that's because I’ve  been around for a long time now. I’ve been at that stage in my career where I feel comfortable having a talk about these issues when I was first qualified in my first job I wouldn't have wanted to go there and I it might have been unwise to have gone there. Whereas now I’m not that I’m untouchable but it's just a bit more it's just a perhaps a bit more with age as well at ease with myself I guess. The other thing I was saying you're saying about what you get out of it. I’ve told you to Hong-Anh before is that I do feel when I do this work it's one of the ways I like that I honour the ancestors and really just be thankful for the fact that you know people who went through hideous time you know I’m here and I'm able to feel bits to try and make things better for those who are coming after us. I do get something out of it yeah.

Holly: Thank you. Thank you Shakira for the question. I think that's really powerful and certainly personally that makes me feel like I should be paying more attention to pick up when those things are happening so I can step in for my colleagues. And that's definitely on my action list from now on and Shakira has said thank you as well. She says thanks for your responses I'm sure many um people of colour in libraries are outnumbered so it can be a daunting task absolutely yeah. Yeah okay. 

Just quickly we've had some great links on writing styles so we will link those as well because it says we're absolutely committed in Knowledge for Healthcare to build growth and develop a diverse and inclusive library knowledge services workforce, but then William does mention, and this is absolutely true, I guess diversity isn't once in the quality impact outcome framework so perhaps even if it isn't assessed it should be mentione. I think that's a really important point I will take back to my colleagues thank you William.

What we're going to do now is I’m going to unmute you all so if you can just mute yourself so we're not suddenly inundated with background information, and then you can ask questions. If you want to using the hand up function. Okay here we go you can just mute yourself please. Anybody want to ask a question please put your hands up.

I don't see any hands coming up just yet you can also still use the chat if you want to to ask questions or make comments about the things that we've been discussing today otherwise let me just scroll down a little. I’ve got hand, Bertha I’m just going to come to you I’m going to unmute you so please ask your question.

Bertha: Hi uh well rather instead of a question I just wanted to share things that we have been doing here at MSC at Southend so I started this job in February 2019. And when I first started one of the first things was to get involved with different groups just to attend to the meetings um I attended to the faith group and I attended to the BAME group. So when I attended to the BAME group I found out that there was so much work that we could contribute and from then we started this diversity collection here and more recently we started this inclusion and diversity bulletin which has been well received.

So I think for me just sharing my experience is we need to be curious what what's going on what's around there. You know as librarians we think of doctors and nurses but there is managers their managers, porters there is so much going on and we are not curious to find out what are their life and how we can serve them then if it's all all these things going.

So I don't feel myself that I am I am not BAME but if you see my face and if you hear my voice then you know that I’m not a white british, but where I come from I’m a white privileged person. I’m from Mexico and in that context is how I learn about my privilege and I still hold this privilege here because at some point I just shut down, but I noticed that if I shut down then i don't learn and yeah so this is what I wanted to share with you.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: That's wonderful. Thank you and I think your point about curiosity is so important. It's a really important trait for our profession in general but yeah especially for this. It's about being curious about how other people's lives are different from yours, other people have different viewpoints obviously with different experiences. They're not all necessarily bad but they are different and just having that understanding to broaden your worldview is so important for this.

Natasha Howard:  Yeah thanks Bertha I did actually mean I don't know if we did put it on the reading list. We were going to flag up your bulletin if that's okay? But that's a result that people might want to read for themselves or to forward, just to subscribe and forward to other colleagues in their organization and that will do once more share things.

Holly: Thank you. Okay I’ve got a question this is a good question from the chat and from an anonymous person. Our manager is very concerned about us doing anything which seems political. Do you have any suggestions for helping to affirm that this is not politics but essential work for the library?

Natasha Howard: Oh tricky because I think it is political, isn't it? I think the NHS is inherently political, unfortunately. That's not helpful though for the question and can we bring it back to thinking about like we said earlier on about the health inequalities about the social determinants that kind of aspect. How it ties into prevention and these kind of things I mean I think libraries aren't neutral and I think you know if you don't you don't take a stance you know you're on the side of the oppressors. You I think people should be taking a start with pro equality and pro-social justice and I appreciate that it's hard to articulate managers.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah so um I think it depends on how comfortable you feel with having a one-to-one conversation with this manager but I don't think they mean political. I think that's a coded word. I think that what I’m really saying is i don't really feel comfortable with this or I don't really get what this is about. One of the most important things in this work is to utilize your personal relationships because, you know, there is so much fear and uncertainty that people hold around this work. So actually using your personal relationship having those one-to-one chats, they can become a really safe space to help people to understand things that maybe they don't have space to talk about elsewhere. So yeah I think if you can feel comfortable to have that conversation and say to them you know what do you mean by political. Why is that necessarily bad? Why is it out of our remit? This is the way I see it see what happens out of that conversation because yeah I I don't think they mean political.

[Laughter]

Holly: Thank you. That is that is tough and it's something and I think you just have to keep talking about it. Yeah yeah so Bertha said we can share the bulletin which is great we will definitely do that. I’m going to come to Trisha now and just unmute you because she's got her hand up. Let me just do some scrolling, so Trisha.

Natasha Howard: Holly, my doorbell's going. I’m sorry i'll be back in a sec.

Holly: No worries.

Trisha: I’m just wondering how far we should be also including other people the underserved. So there are white sections of society who are discriminated against because of where they live or how they speak and also I just make the point we need to be quite careful about the language we use you know people still use quite a lot of unacceptable language, say like chav or something like that and people use it without even thinking about it and I was just having a discussion with somebody today at work about this aspect of it.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah yeah I think that's a really good point uh I'll just recap for Natasha who's just come back, as Tricia had a point about you know thinking about um other underrepresented groups so thinking about kind of um you know uh groups that socioeconomic disadvantage for example. I I think this is why it's important to take an intersectional approach to this. This is there's an order of uh lord quote that I love which is um around you know we don't live single issue lives and intersectionality is about that you know. If we take up the cause of race equality then we're also taking up the cause of of LGBT equality too, of gender equality, of classis, ableism. You know all those things are intertwined all oppression is connected so our approach to that should also be connected to holistic. So yeah absolutely that's that's essential for us to think about as well, but also all fashion is connected but they're all also distinct that they all need slightly different approaches to everyone experiences slightly different challenges as well.

Holly: Thank you. Got a few more things coming up on the chat related to the the previous question about managers who think this is too political. Helen has said that her Trust is very anxious to take this on and at every meeting and at every level we're being asked to consider Black Lives Matter. I think it's less politically risky than it used to be, so maybe it goes back to that point that you mentioned right at the beginning Hong-Anh, or was it Natasha, sorry. About finding case studies from other organisations of what they're doing and why it's been so good for their service. Yeah you don't have to reinvent the wheel, there's a lot of great practice going on out there, and a suggestion rather than a question, saying she's currently reading an excellent book. She's learned a lot and she's only a few chapter in called "Why I'm Not Talking to White People About Race" by Reni Eddo-Lodge which I think it's on the reading list and also a couple of others as well which are kind of if you're interested in kind of continuing your reading journey around that. And there's more stuff like that on there.

Okay, I can't see any more hands up. Apologies if I've missed you and it is 3pm now and there aren't any more questions on the chat so I think we will wrap this up, if that's okay? Unless either of you want to make any more comments before we go?

Natasha Howard: No, just thank everyone for joining in and engaging with us on this it's been a good way to spend a Friday afternoon.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah I agree thank you for hosting this chat and also for everyone who's come along and contributed. If you have any other questions, you know, please do get in touch with us. We'd be more than happy to have a chat or answer any other questions.

Holly: Yeah definitely so we have been discussing this and we think that this is probably the beginging of this sort of learning webinar discussion piece where we all talk about how health libraries should respond to other people perhaps within the protected characteristics so that would be interesting. We'd be really interested to hear from you and we will be publishing this webinar as a recording and its transcript, our list of resources which we've been talking about all session, a blog post about it as well in the next few weeks, so please keep an eye our for that and other thing I'd really appreciate is if when you receive your evaluation form please fill it in. There'll be a section there for you to make a pledge. I think we've all have some actions to take away from today about the things that we can do going forward, so it'd be a great to see some of those from you and Natasha and Hong-Anh, thank you so much for taking the time out today to answer those questions and to just give a much needed space to have this discussion.

Natasha Howard: Oh thanks for having us.

Hong-Anh Nguyen: Yeah thank you for expertly hosting as well Holly.

Holly: All right so we'll just leave that there. Thank you everyone and happy Friday. Thanks everyone bye.