The untold stories of Filipino nurses and other migrant workers in Britain are being celebrated in a new roving exhibition to mark the 75th anniversary of the NHS.
The Migration Museum is launching its touring exhibition, Heart of the Nation: Migration and the Making of the NHS, at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery from 30 June to 29 October, the first leg of a national tour. The exhibition will go to Leeds in November and to London in 2024.
The immersive media exhibition highlights the “significant” contribution of migrant workers to the NHS since its creation in 1948, which has “been ignored for too long”. It features the many personal stories contributed by people who came from all over the world to work at all levels in the NHS from the 1940s to the present day, alongside photography, film, newly commissioned artwork, rare historical artifacts and ephemera.
At the center of the exhibition is a newly commissioned interactive music and video installation, created and produced by seven people currently working in the NHS, exploring themes of care through song and story.
Health care workers from the Philippines and neighboring Southeast Asian countries are among the many groups featured in the exhibit. More than 22,000 people from the Philippines worked for the NHS at the start of the Covid pandemic, according to a report by the Commons library, where the country is one of the largest exporters of nurses in the world.
“The story of Southeast Asians and Filipinos in the health service has not been recognized as well, and has not been highlighted as much as other stories that we know better,” said Aditi Anand, the artistic. director of the Migration Museum, who curated the exhibition.
“People from those countries played an important role, especially recently, but also going back to the 50s, 60s, and 70s.”
Filipino healthcare workers are particularly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic: the community is facing the highest number of deaths among NHS and social care staff, according to the Association of Nurse in Filipino, which accounts for 22% of all staff deaths.
The stories highlighted in the exhibition, compiled by Becky Hoh-Hale for the Ingat Ingat project, include that of Henedina Gadong, who came to the UK in 1976 and remembers how she was humiliated by her supervisors, despite her award -winning career performance; Mariacruz Appleton, who came in 1969 and said she felt like an “ambassador” for the Philippines because people in the UK were unfamiliar with the country; and Mirasol de Guzman, who arrived in 2000, left his family behind as he worked to build a better life for them in the UK.
Anand was particularly moved by Appleton’s story. “The reason the story stuck with me is because of the amazing photos and archives; She got this photo of her getting off the plane at Heathrow dressed very stylishly, wearing a 1960s shift dress. There’s something about imagining and seeing people in all their personalities, passions, and the reasons that brought them here,” he said.
“His story is very interesting because many people come here to work without always knowing where they will be sent. She was a midwife back in the Philippines, but she and one of her midwife friends who accompanied her were sent to a psychiatric hospital. They went to do challenging mental health nursing, which they are [had] never been done before.”
Appleton’s experience is one shared by many migrant health workers. “There is such a shortage of nurses and doctors in particular specialties within the NHS that are considered less attractive to British-trained doctors and nurses. They are doing an important job of filling the gap that exists,” said Anand.
Today, around one in six people working in the NHS have a non-British nationality, while many more are the children and grandchildren of migrant healthcare workers. “We have an idea that migration is an important part of the NHS, but not how central it is. Without migration the NHS would never have survived its early years,” Anand said.
“Much of Britain’s health care system relies on links to Britain’s former empire. We’ve got these amazing sets of photographs in the exhibition that show these medical colleges and institutions in hospitals built by the British in their former colonies where you have training provided by the medical health care system in Britain. So it’s just creating long-standing links that go back hundreds of years.
“Even when these countries gained their independence, decolonized, the links always remained. You have the Nationality Act of 1948, which allowed people to travel [as] members of the British empire and went to Britain. The NHS cannot really be understood without the context of an empire and how the people who come here and work operate.
