Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Mary Onuoha

As has been my pattern on Sunday, today’s piece is about someone who should deserve our respect and praise. This week it is Mary Onuoha, who was born and raised in Nigeria now lives in South London.

From the Daily Mail:

The Christian faith was at the heart of the Nigerian village where Mary was raised, the eldest of ten siblings in a loving family. And it was there that a family tragedy set her on the path to becoming a nurse.

‘When I was 15 my beloved two-year-old brother died of measles,’ she recalls. ‘I was so sad that there wasn’t the medical care available for him that could have saved him at that time in the area where I lived. This made me passionate about caring for people and about medicine.

‘I was determined to help my mother and make sure it did not happen again.’

Mary moved to the UK with her husband Charles, settling in South London, where the couple have lived ever since with their family and where Mary qualified as a nurse.

In November 2001, she started to work at Croydon University Hospital, employed latterly as a theatre practitioner, a nursing role performed primarily in the operating theatre and providing pre- and post-operative care. Her cross was sometimes concealed by her scrubs, but was visible on other occasions.

However, it never attracted comment until 2014, when the theatre manager at the time asked her to remove it on health-and-safety grounds. ‘I refused and said words to the effect of ‘What about hijabs, turbans and kalava bracelets?’,’ Mary recalls. ‘She said she would get back to me but did not do so.

It was the first of many similar incidents, with a succession of managers asking her to conceal or remove her cross, deeming it a health-and-safety risk. If not, Mary was told, the matter would face ‘escalation’.

It was the start of what Mary says she can only describe as an ongoing campaign of intimidation by senior hospital managers, during which she was subjected to an investigation into her conduct.

By November 2018, she was suspended from clinical duties and instead assigned clerical work and told that security would be called if she attempted to enter a theatre area while still wearing her cross.

Nonetheless, by June 2020 the stress had become too much and Mary was signed off work by her doctor. Two months later she resigned, effectively forced out of a job she loved. For months afterwards she was unable to work, though she has now found a new job. ‘I never thought I would ever be in a situation like this, but I was determined to get through it,’ she says

She was equally determined to hold her employers to account – and last week her courage was vindicated by Judge Dyal who, in a damning ruling, said that the dress-code policy was applied ‘in an arbitrary way’ and with ‘no cogent explanation’ why plain rings, neckties, hijabs and turbans were permitted, but a cross necklace was not.

Kudos to Mary Onuoha.

1/23/22

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