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Dr Aggrey Burke obituary

Dr Aggrey Burke obituary

Consultant psychiatrist who blew the whistle on racist admission policies at London medical schools In 1986 the psychiatrist Dr Aggrey Burke, along with his colleague Joe Collier, had gathered evidence that their employer, St George’s hospital, and other London medical schools, were discriminating against women and people with “foreign sounding names” in their admission processes. Burke and Collier, both then senior lecturers at St George’s, decided to blow the whistle. They published a paper that led to a Commission for Racial Equality inquiry , and wholesale changes to the admission policies at medical schools across the capital. Burke knew the risk the pair were taking, saying it was “as though one had offended against the whole system; we were blamed, unfairly treated and made to feel that we were outcasts”. As the first Black consultant psychiatrist in the UK , Burke, who has died aged 82 of prostate cancer, was at the forefront of challenging mental health systems to treat Black people with fairness, and of supporting those caught up in the criminal justice system. The most notable case he worked on was that of the Rastafarian Stephen Thompson who, in 1980, was sectioned in Rampton secure hospital in Nottinghamshire because he violently resisted prison officers cutting off his locks, ignoring the religious significance of his hair. Burke was one of the independent psychiatrists who intervened, and he managed to have Thompson released after what he humbly called a process of “negotiation”. Continue reading...