One in Five BAME NHS Managers Say They Plan to Leave

One in five BAME managers surveyed say they will leave the NHS in the next three years. The result comes from a survey of 950 BAME managers about racism and career progression, carried out by the NHS Alliance and reported on 15 September 2026. The Guardian

Almost four-fifths of those surveyed said they had faced racism, exclusion and barriers to promotion. The survey treats those three as connected parts of working life, not one-off incidents. The group surveyed was managers, not frontline clinical staff as a whole.

Those accounts come alongside more diversity at board level. BAME membership of NHS boards rose from 7.1% in 2016 to 17.3% in 2025. A board is the senior group that oversees a trust. The figure covers board seats. It does not show how people move up through middle and senior management.

The work has named owners. Sir Ciarán Devane is chief executive of the NHS Alliance. Victor Adebowale (Lord Adebowale) is chair of the NHS Alliance. Prof Habib Naqvi is chief executive of the NHS Race and Health Observatory. The Observatory said it had seen a growing number of inquiries from BAME NHS staff who had experienced racism. The Guardian

The broader context here is a gap familiar in large public organisations between the top and the middle. The share sounds small. The effect could be large. Board diversity can shift through appointments. Promotion depends on day-to-day machinery like line managers, temporary acting roles, secondments and how complaints are handled. If one in five managers plans to leave within three years, that weakens the pipeline for future leaders.

Looking at what this means for stability, the concern is experience as well as numbers. Managers hold institutional memory. They set rotas, hire staff, manage disciplinary cases and put policy into practice. Losing experienced BAME managers would reduce diversity where daily decisions are made, even if boards stay diverse. More inquiries to the Observatory point to staff looking outside their own trusts for help.

In my view, the test is whether promotion is examined as closely as board appointments have been. The survey measures intention to leave, not actual departures. Intentions can soften. They can also harden. For retention, the points to watch are how trusts respond to reports of racism and exclusion, how promotion barriers are checked, and whether Observatory inquiries level off or keep rising.