Ms Gissele Buckle v Ashford and St Peter’s Hospital NHS Trust and 2 others — 2019

This was a reserved judgment by Employment Judge E Fowell sitting with Mrs S Dengate and Ms S J Murray at London South. The claimant, an agency midwife, brought race discrimination, harassment and victimisation complaints arising from a single night shift on 12 and 13 July 2017 at St Peter's Hospital. The Tribunal recorded at the outset that the claims against Your World Recruitment Group had been withdrawn and were dismissed on withdrawal.

The Tribunal accepted that Patient A and her partner were a difficult couple and that the partner shouted at the claimant shortly after 4.00 am. It also accepted Ms Mills' evidence that the claimant had earlier been found in the staff room when she should have been with the patient, and it preferred Ms Mills' account over parts of the claimant's notes where the claimant had written retrospectively. The Tribunal found that the claimant's main contemporaneous concern was the accusation that she had falsified notes, not any racial comment.

Applying Equality Act 2010 sections 13, 19, 26, 27 and 136, together with the burden-of-proof approach in Ayodele v CityLink Limited, the Tribunal dismissed the direct race discrimination, harassment, victimisation and indirect race discrimination claims. It found that no racially motivated remark was proved, that Ms Mills did not know of any alleged racial connotation, and that requiring the claimant to remain with the patient was driven by staffing and patient-safety reasons. The indirect discrimination complaint failed because no relevant PCP was proved, and the Tribunal said that justification would in any event have succeeded because of the high-risk clinical context. No remedy was awarded.