NHS Commissions Study Into the Economic Cost of Racism

The NHS Race and Health Observatory has commissioned a major study to calculate, in pounds and pence, what racism costs England's healthcare system — with findings due in May next year.

The research will estimate the economic impact of racial inequities across both healthcare delivery and the NHS workforce. Its scope covers inequalities in health outcomes, access to treatment, delayed diagnoses and patient experience. It follows a cost-of-racism briefing the Observatory published last year.

Three organisations will carry out the work: the NHS Health Economics Unit, the NHS Strategy Unit and the charity People Street. Together they will attempt to quantify the costs of racism as they fall on patients, individuals, communities, the NHS itself, public finances and wider society.

What it means for NHS staff

For the more than one million people working in the health service, the workforce strand is the most direct. Researchers will examine experiences of discrimination, sickness absence, recruitment, career progression and retention. They will also study system-level consequences: complaints, grievances and litigation — the channels through which discrimination often converts into measurable financial cost.

People Street will bring what it calls "lived experience" evidence to the study through a series of local panels, interviews and focus groups, ensuring the analysis rests not only on administrative data but on staff and patient testimony.

An evidence-based guide for decision-makers

The study's stated output is practical rather than academic. It aims to establish an evidence-based guide helping NHS managers, leaders and policy-makers understand three things: where the economic consequences of racism arise, what can currently be quantified, and where evidence is missing. That last point matters — the Observatory expects the work to identify gaps requiring further research or policy action, which could shape where future funding and interventions are directed.

For HR and equality leaders inside NHS trusts, the guide may become a benchmarking tool: a way to argue for resources by pointing to the avoidable costs of inaction, from litigation to lost productivity, rather than relying on the moral case alone.

The human cost beyond the balance sheet

Professor Habib Naqvi, chief executive of the NHS Race and Health Observatory, framed the study in unusually direct terms. "This research has the potential to change how we understand, measure and respond to the true cost of racism in the NHS," he said.

"Racism is not only a profound moral and social injustice; it also carries a significant financial cost to the public purse through avoidable litigation, delayed care, poorer outcomes, workforce harm and lost productivity. But the heaviest toll is borne by individuals, families and communities — and that 'human cost' cannot be captured fully in pounds and pence."

The Observatory is an independent body hosted by the NHS Alliance and supported by NHS England, which gives the study institutional weight within the service. Its publication next May is likely to feed into ongoing debates over NHS funding, workforce planning and the government's health inequalities agenda — and to give employers across the system a first serious estimate of what discrimination costs them each year.