He is highly motivated to deliver clear outcomes and results for patients and staff.  Ade has a wealth of knowledge and a demonstrable track record of delivering outcomes for the Trust.

Ade has an underlying philosophy of helping individuals to achieve and deliver high standard of work. He has a sense of responsibility in ensuring and safeguarding high standards by holding people to account and enabling staff to focus on patients’ needs with compassion and care.

As a mentor, Ade asks his mentees not to be passive receivers but active participants. He also encourages staff to honour commitments, expect support but don’t expect miracles without hard work, communicate clearly, assume responsibility for own development, be teachable, and to listen to what is being said and not said, especially how it is being said.

Agatha chairs the LAS’s Black and Minority (BME) Ethnic Network and is the Trust’s clinical lead for the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES). She also sits on the national ambulance BME forum. In 2018 she completed the NHS WRES Expert programme as part of cohort 1, and has used this experience to champion the BME agenda within LAS, making a real difference to the working lives of BME staff and volunteers. Agatha is passionate about supporting others to develop confidence and leadership skills. From her own experience, she is very much aware of the inequalities facing people from BME backgrounds in terms of career progression. She says:

“Although society has come a long way, people from BME backgrounds still have to work that bit harder to move up the career ladder: you can’t be average, you have to excel”.

She is keen to support others to do just that and says:

“It’s a case of putting yourself out there, constantly developing your skills and making the connections you need in order to move forward”.

She is a role model to colleagues of BME backgrounds, saying:

“Where people can see someone who looks like them in a senior position it reinforces the idea that they can achieve their own aspirations. As leaders from BME backgrounds, we have to be visible, approachable, provide support and open doors for others to develop and excel”.

Agatha is a trained mentor, and over the years has provided informal coaching and mentoring to support personal and career development for healthcare colleagues. This includes providing mentoring to women from several different countries via the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women.

He is also a stab victim, and has used his personal experiences and story, told skilfully through awe-inspiring poetry and film, to develop a powerful programme of public health intervention targeting youth-on-youth violence and knife crime.

Born at North Mid Hospital in 1990, and having grown up in Winchmore Hill and Enfield, at the age of 21, Amani was stabbed seven times while intervening in an attempted robbery.

Describing the night he got stabbed, Amani recalled that while being rushed by ambulance for major trauma surgery:

“I had this kind of very surreal conversation with God and I said that if I had another chance to live my life, I would use it steer young people away from the negative.”

‘Amani’ – partly filmed at North Mid in August 2018, and featuring at least three North Mid staff among its actors – was launched online in early 2019, racking up 2 million views in just four days. The powerful short has formed a central part of Amani’s working touring schools, colleges, community groups and advocacy with community leaders.

Amani was recently shortlisted out of 28,000 as Positive Role Model at the 2019 National Diversity Awards, and is an ambassador for the Mayor of London’s London Needs You Alive campaign.

The 30-year-old, who grew up in Kenya, was shocked and excited when she found out she’d been nominated by Kay O’Reilly, the Trust’s lead nurse for respiratory conditions. She said:

“What an honour to represent my Trust this Black History Month. Not only being nominated, but winning, has made me feel elated and highly valued. I love everything about nursing. It’s the only thing I know so I am hugely passionate about it.”

Angela was nominated for her hard work during the Covid-19 pandemic. On one nightshift, she took over running the team on her ward, teaching others how to use new machinery, while keeping patients safe. Being based in a respiratory ward meant Angela has been caring for Covid-19 patients throughout.

As the only nurse in her family, Angela’s caring nature meant she always knew it was what she wanted to do. Having qualified at the Nairobi Hospital, she worked on an endoscopy unit there for two years before her father encouraged her to further her career and experience by moving to the UK.

She’s worked at the Trust, her first experience of the NHS, for the last three years. Although she’s spoken English all her life, Angela still had some language issues when she began nursing in the UK, and fondly remembers how her patients helped her. She said:

“I got confused by ‘tea’ as dinner or an afternoon snack, and a cup of tea. Luckily one of my patients helped me by explaining to ask if they wanted a ‘cup of tea’!”

She became a supervisor of midwives in 1991, later becoming an advanced midwifery practitioner in the community, and working in a team integrating hospital and community in 1997. Following retirement from the midwifery service, Carmen worked in the Trust’s occupational health team on the staff bank for two years.

Doreen was born in Jamaica and emigrated to the UK with her family in the 1960s when she was nine years old. She completed her schooling in and around Greenwich and worked in a bank for seven years before having her first child, Stephen, in 1974.

By 1993, after having two further children, Stuart and Georgina, she was living in Plumstead and enrolled on a counselling course at the University of Greenwich. It was also 1993 when her son Stephen was stabbed to death in a racially motivated attack in Eltham. Doreen’s history from then is defined by her love for Stephen, her moral clarity and her instinct to fight for justice to ensure her son did not die in vain. She set up the Stephen Lawrence Family Campaign and persevered through many obstacles to push for an inquiry into her son’s murder.

The damning enquiry touched on major issues with policing and the justice system with regards to black people. Many reforms, based directly on this investigation, have since been introduced and Doreen has emerged as one of the country’s leading voices on black injustice. She founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust to continue to provide support to black communities across the capital and the country.

Doreen has received many deserved accolades and distinctions for her work on racial justice, including an OBE and a peerage at the House of Lords. In her community, she will always be remembered as a loving mother whose grief and love for her family changed the course of the nation’s history for the better.

Eddie Nestor, is a British actor, stand-up comedian, TV and radio presenter, who is best known for his starring roles in The Real McCoy and Desmond’s, as well as appearing in Trainspotting.

He hosted, alongside Robbie Gee, the Imperial College Indian Society’s annual “East Meets West” charity show in 2007 and 2008. The show in both years was one of the most successful and popular charity shows in the UK, drawing over 1,750 people to the prestigious London Palladium in 2008. He appeared in the BBC’s Canterbury Tales and is a former Casualty star. He currently presents BBC London 94.9 FM’s show Drivetime from 4pm to 7pm on weekday evenings, replacing Henry Bonsu who left to pursue other broadcasting opportunities. He was voted “The Speech Broadcaster of the Year” at the Sony Radio Academy Awards 2007.

In February 2007, Eddie was diagnosed as having Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and kept a blog of his treatment and reactions. He is currently in remission.

This experience led Moody to set up his own GP practice in Peckham, south east London in 1913. Moody offered his services to poor families for free and also opened up his home to ‘travelling black people who couldn’t find a room or a meal elsewhere’. The racial prejudice Moody faced in London motivated him to campaign for the rights of black people.

In 1931, he founded the League of Coloured Peoples, a pressure group which lobbied trade unions, the Civil Service and Parliament for the improvement of race relations. Moody fought for causes including employment rights for black merchant seamen, fair pay for Trinidadian oil workers and the lifting of the colour bar in the British Armed Forces that had prevented the appointment of black officers.

Dr Harold Moody died on 24 April 1947, shortly after returning to England from the West Indies. His campaigning is credited as being key to the passing of the Race Relations Act in 1965.

He was named the BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year in 2005 and has since raced at the Commonwealth Games, the Olympic Games, the British Athletics Championships, the European Athletics Championships, the World Indoor Athletics Championships, the European Indoor Athletics Championships, and the World Athletics Championships. He won the 100 metres event at the 2020 British Athletics Championships this year.

In 2011 he received glowing reviews for his role in Sci-Fi comedy Attack the Block, before starring alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton in Half of a Yellow Sun, and headlining Imperial Dreams in 2014. After that, Boyega’s career hit the stratosphere when he took on the role of Finn in the highly-anticipated Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which became one of the highest-grossing blockbusters in movie history. After Star Wars, Boyega starred alongside Emma Watson and Tom Hanks in indie Sci-Fi The Circle, and in Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, a hard-hitting drama about the 1967 Detroit Riots.

In 2016, John Boyega received a BAFTA in the Rising Star category, along with Best Male Newcomer at the Empire Awards, and Male Revelation at Cannes Film Festival.

Boyega, who was born in London to parents of Nigerian descent, was praised for his impassionate speech at London’s Black Lives Matter rally on 3 June, following the killing of George Floyd. Despite acknowledging his words could have a detrimental impact on his career, Boyega continues to voice injustices and racism within society and commercial industries.

John Oke died in October 2019 having lived in Kentish Town (near the hospital), and having founded the Camden Black Parents and Teachers Association (CBPTA) and the Odu Dua Housing Association. Born in Nigeria, he arrived in Britain as a teenager and trained as civil engineer before returning to Nigeria. He then returned to the UK in the 1970s and settled in Kentish Town for forty years. He identified that too many black children were leaving school without qualifications and in 1980 set up the CBPTA.

In 1986, he set up the Odu Dia Housing Association to support homeless black men in Camden, before widening the remit to support the homeless in Camden, Barnet and Brent. He was also a parent governor at Acland Burghley School and a governor at Edith Neville and St Michael’s CoE primary schools.

Julie-Anne was put forward by the Trust’s Equality Network as she is seen as an inspirational leader within the Trust. Compassionate and supportive, she also challenges and sets high standards and influences all professional groups in the Trust, not just the nursing workforce that she leads.

She has acted as a mentor to many staff encouraging others to follow in her footsteps. Julie-Anne has been a nurse for 35 years, commencing her nursing career as an Enrolled Nurse, she successfully converted to a Registered General Nurse and eventually gained a qualification as a Registered Sick Children’s Nurse. Julie-Anne went into nursing to care for people and feels it is an honour to be allowed to care for patients and their families at their most vulnerable time. She has had many proud moments in her career, amongst those was achieving a Doctorate in Leadership & Management, which she completed alongside her demanding career.

Ken Wakatama has been a qualified Mental Health Nurse (RMN) since April 1994. He has had a full, varied, enriched and extremely enjoyable career so far, with many challenges and opportunities arising.

Ken initially worked for the Barnet Health authority as a staff nurse for 2 years in the paediatric intensive care unit service. In 1996, he took up employment with the West London NHS Trust as a Staff Nurse working primarily in the HDU and Intensive Care Service.

He feels privileged to have worked across all the clinical settings in Mental Health Services, including in the high secure setting of Broadmoor Hospital. Ken has worked as a team leader, Clinical Nurse Manager, Acting Senior Clinical Manager and regularly provides cover in the capacity of Site Manager.

Ken has a wealth of knowledge and experience in the management and care of a complex group of patients with extensive mental health difficulties. Always looking to develop further, Ken gained a B.Sc. for violence reduction and has represented the Trust in various conferences.

As a member of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympics Games’ Policing Co-ordination Team, he was involved in the planning for a safe and secure event. In 2000 he received an MBE for his contribution to policing.

Leroy is also very active in the community and in the advancement of race and equality issues. He is behind numerous award-winning programmes, including the thriving young peoples’ forum Young Black Positive Advocates (YBPA) and the Young Leaders for a Safer City, which are made up of graduates from the Leadership Programme launched in 2001.

Last year Martin was appointed NHS England’s first clinical director for violence reduction after spending the last decade saving lives and lecturing school children on the dangers of carrying weapons to help prevent stabbings and other violent crimes. He is a top trauma surgeon who saved the life of the first person stabbed in the London Bridge terror attack and in a huge coincidence, had also saved the victim’s father’s life when he operated on his heart several years earlier.

Martin is a passionate campaigner for fairness and equality, and promotes diverse leadership in private and public services, particularly within the NHS. In 2018, Martin Griffiths won the Hero Doctor Award at the Daily Mirror NHS Heroes awards.

“I sat before the flickering fire, with my last patient in my lap – a poor, little, brown-faced orphan, scarce a year old, was dying in my arms, and I was powerless to save it. It may seem strange, but it is a fact, that I thought more of that little child than I did of the men who were struggling for their lives.”

So affected was Mary by this death that she undertook ‘her first and last’ post-mortem examination to try and discover more about the dreaded cholera that had killed the child. During a dinner in her honour, an American she had nursed back to health from this deadly disease, made the mistake of including this statement in his toast to her:

“I calculate, gentlemen, you’re all as vexed as I am that she’s not wholly white; and I guess, if we could bleach her by any means we would and thus make her acceptable in any company as she deserves to be. Gentlemen, I give you Aunty Seacole!”

Mary was so angry that after a few words of thanks she said:

“But I must say that I don’t altogether appreciate your friend’s kind wishes with respect to my complexion … and as to his offer of bleaching me, I should, even if it were practicable, decline it without any thanks. As to the society which the process might gain me admission into, all I can say is, that judging from the specimens I have met with here and elsewhere, I don’t think that I shall lose much by being excluded from it. So, gentlemen, I drink to you and the general reformation of American manners.”

Mary Seacole then became famous for nursing British soldiers on the frontline during the Crimean War. In London she had found it impossible to obtain a post with the group of nurses planning to join those who had already left to work under Florence Nightingale. Mary wondered:

“Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?”

Mary overcame all the obstacles and raised the funds to pay for her passage to Turkey. On arrival in the Crimea she set up the British Hotel where she cooked tasty meals and sold provisions. In additions she nursed the soldiers in the battlefield and became widely known as ‘Mother Seacole’.

At the end of the Crimean War Mary Seacole returned to London bankrupt. Fortunately, her many friends rallied to her aid through a series of military fundraising galas. In 1857 she published her bestselling autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. After more overseas travels Mary died in London on the 14th May 1881.

Although the Victorian media had published many articles about her, she was virtually forgotten after her death. Fortunately, in November 2003 Lord Clive Soley established the Mary Seacole Memorial Statue Appeal. This came about following several Caribbean women asking that he help ensure a fitting memorial for Mary. There was a long, but successful, fundraising campaign that lasted over 12 years. As a result, a beautiful monument was unveiled in the gardens of London’s St Thomas’ Hospital on the 30th June 2016 by Baroness Floella Benjamin.

Patricia started her nursing career on a medical ward, and after a year, worked on an oncology/ haematology ward which she loved. She worked there for 9 years and then became a haematology specialist nurseShe moved to London in 2014 to take up a Head of Nursing role in cancer at St George’s. She did this for a year then became a Matron at University College London Hospital (UCLH).

Patricia is described as a caring and compassionate leader who has an excellent vision. Throughout her career shehas helped lots of colleagues to progress. ‘Lift as you climb’ is her philosophy which she achieves by encouraging Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) nursing staff to apply for opportunities. Patricia is also passionate about the digital agenda and is an active member of the Shuri Network, which was developed for women of colour who are interested in the health tech agenda. As a member, Patricia has contributed to webinars on behalf of the network. The talks are based on equality, diversity and inclusion.

Some of Patricia’s past accomplishments include being the founding member and Chair of the UCLH BAME Network for almost 400 members. The BAME network secured £10,000 of funding from Health Education England for the development of mentoring for BAME staff. Furthermore, she wrote a successful UCLH charity bid to fund support roles for the BAME network, the roles also were able to support the LGBT and women’s network too.

Patricia joined The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust as a Divisional Nurse Director in February 2020. In this short time, Patricia has already made a significant impact as a champion for equality and inclusion.

It was Paul’s desire to overcome his own battles and help young children that came from backgrounds similar to his own that inspired him to start the Paul Canoville Foundation, which aims to engage and motivate young people who may be facing adversity to deal with the challenges they may face.

Paul also is an avid campaigner and spokesperson against racism and is also the Ambassador of the ‘Music’ Against Racism’ campaign; an organisation set up in 2020 in response to rising levels of racism. He is also qualified mental health talking therapy practitioner.

Miss Samantha Tross is the Lead Orthopaedic Surgeon at Ealing Hospital, specialising in treating conditions of the hip and knee. She became a Consultant in 2005 and was the first female of Afro-Caribbean descent in the UK to do so. In 2018, she scored another first by becoming the first woman in Europe to perform Mako robotic hip surgery.

Miss Tross was born in Guyana, South America and came to England aged 11. She graduated from University College London in 1992. Her basic surgical training was on the Royal London rotation and higher surgical training on Guys & St. Thomas and King’s College Hospitals rotation. She subsequently undertook fellowships in Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia.

Apart from her clinical work Miss Tross is an Educational Supervisor, Faculty Group Leader and Director of Core Surgical Training for her hospital, overseeing the training of junior doctors in her Trust. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Medical Case Reports, Examiner for Imperial Medical School exams and recipient of a Black British Business STEM Award for her work promoting science and medical careers to her community. Miss Tross regularly presents at Orthopaedic conferences and is an Associate Professor in Orthopaedics for the University of the Caribbean.

Miss Tross has been profiled in an educational series by Verna Wilkins which is part of the national curriculum for schools. She has been included in the Black Powerlist of 100 most Influential Black Britons since 2009 and was named in Tatlers 100 most Influential doctors in the UK in 2013. She has been featured in the BMJ Careers in 2018 and the Metro and Stylist magazine in 2019. In the same year, she was awarded the WINTRADE Award for Women in the Public Sector and was the keynote speaker for the Mayor’s black history month event at City Hall.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a globally acclaimed composer, referred to as the African “Mahler”. Samuel was born in Holborn in 1875 and later moved to Croydon. As well as his musical achievements he was also recognised as a civil rights leader who fought against race prejudice.

Conscious of his African descent, Taylor’s classical compositions were heavily influenced by traditional African music and this made him one of the most progressive writers of his time.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor died of pneumonia on 1 September 1912 in Croydon, at the age of 37.

A London-based grime MC of Ghanaian heritage, Stormzy made a swift rise in the early 2010s to become one of the U.K.’s most critically acclaimed artists. Climbing out of the underground grime scene with a series of triumphant mixtapes, singles, and freestyles, he made his breakthrough in 2017 with his platinum-certified, chart-topping debut Gang Signs & Prayer, which incorporated gospel and R&B influences. Within five years of the release of his debut EP, he was a Glastonbury festival headliner.

Stormzy is a mulit-award-winning artist, including 3 Brits, 6 MOBOs and an MTV Europe Music award.

In 2018, Stormzy launched the Cambridge scholarship ‘The Stormzy Scholarship’, which pays for tuition fees and provides a maintenance grant for up to four years of an undergraduate course for some black students. He also recently donated £500,000 to The Black Heart Foundation which helps fund educational scholarships for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, as part of his commitment to becoming a major philanthropist supporting black British causes.

In June 2020, Stormzy announced he will donate £10m to black British causes over the next 10 years: “Organisations, charities and movements that are committed to fighting racial inequality, justice reform and black empowerment within the UK.”

Sybil Phoenix is a devoted community worker and is the first black person to receive an MBE. Growing up in British Guiana (now Guyana) in the 1920s and 1930s, Sybil found a passion for helping others at her local church, where she helped to run the youth club.

Having moved to London in 1956 with her fiancée Joe, Sybil saw no need to stop being a champion for her community and started fostering local children in her adopted home of Lewisham. She quickly became known as someone who would provide care for children who were ‘forgotten about’ by wider society, and this work attracted more and more attention. When she was offered an MBE in the 1973 Honours List, Sybil said she would only accept it if she was given something for the community she served, not just for her as an individual. Thus, her supported housing project for single homeless young women in Lewisham was born.

In 1977, the Moonshot youth club in New Cross, one of Sybil’s many projects and the first purpose-built community centre for black youth in the country, was firebombed by the National Front. Her incredible words in reaction:

“My name is Phoenix and I will build a new centre from the ashes of this club, so help me God.”

By 1981, Prince Charles was in attendance as the renovated, expanded club was reopened. Now in her nineties, she has had a spell as Civic Mayoress of Lewisham (having advised the borough on racial issues for some time), has been awarded the freedom of the City of London and the upgraded honour of OBE. The work she has done in south-east London is beyond compare and she continues her busy life in a borough that is still inspired and touched by her work every day.