Meet the Host of Race and Health Matters: Dr Guddi Singh

Dr Guddi Singh is a paediatrician, broadcaster and researcher whose work sits at the fault line between medicine, inequality and social change. From co-writing and appearing in the BBC documentary with David Harewood Why Is Covid Killing People of Colour? to her clinical, academic and public work on structural inequality, she has spent years helping difficult conversations break into the open.

She is also co-founder of WHAM (Wellbeing and Health Action Movement), which supports clinicians to act on health inequalities in practice. Alongside this, her PhD draws on philosophy, feminist empirical bioethics, decolonial thought, sociology and public health to explore what a more historically honest and justice-oriented medical professionalism might look like.

As the host of the NHS Race and Health Observatory’s upcoming Race and Health Matters podcast, Guddi brings warmth, bite and intellectual rigour to some of the most urgent questions facing the NHS today. Read Guddi’s blog below.

Why these conversations matter now

If we want a fairer NHS, we cannot talk only about the inequalities that affect patients while ignoring the inequalities which shape the lives of the people trying to care for them. That is why the Race and Health Matters podcast is so vital.

We often speak about health inequalities as though they happen “out there” — in communities, in the social determinants of health, in patients’ lives. But they also shape the inner life of the NHS itself: who gets heard, who progresses, who gets protected, and who is asked to keep proving themselves. The numbers alone are sobering. In the latest Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) data, white applicants were significantly more likely than BME applicants to be appointed from shortlisting in 80% of NHS trusts.

Why this work is personal

This is deeply personal for me. I grew up watching my father give forty years to the NHS as a surgeon while working harder and longer than many of his white colleagues, and still being passed over for prestige, power and pay. And as a woman of colour myself, I know the quieter, cumulative experience of walking into a room fully qualified and still feeling that your authority is being weighed differently.

During the pandemic, I co-wrote and appeared in the BBC documentary with David Harewood asking why Covid was killing people of colour. That work reached millions and taught me something I have never forgotten: when race and inequality are left unspoken, people suffer in the silence. This podcast feels like part of that same project, bringing difficult truths to light and refusing the comfort of polite avoidance.

Where medicine, media and philosophy meet

It also felt like the perfect meeting point of all the different parts of me.

I’m a clinician, so I care about what all this looks like in the room, on the ward, in the ordinary texture of working life. I’m a broadcaster, so I love conversation — the moment when someone says something that suddenly makes a whole structure visible. And I’m also a philosopher and researcher, which means I’m always drawn to the deeper questions beneath the policy language: power, justice, credibility, moral injury, history, professionalism.

My PhD is about reimagining medical professionalism in a more just, reflective and historically honest way. What felt refreshing about this podcast series was its ability to hold that depth, bringing lived experience, sociology, philosophy, public health, economics and systems thinking into one conversation without losing sight of real people’s lives.

What these conversations bring into view

The conversations were glorious. Professor Doyin Atewologun and Dr Nabeela Kajee showed that lived experience is not just anecdote after the fact, but a form of organisational intelligence. Professor Carol Woodhams and Professor John Appleby showed how metrics are really the residue of human decisions about who gets developed, sponsored and trusted. Harvard University’s Professor David R. Williams was extraordinary on how racism operates not just as belief, but as exposure: chronic, cumulative, embodied.

This is not a podcast that stays on the surface. It is smart, curious, and deeply human.

From recognition to real change

We move conversations about racism from awareness into action by refusing to mistake recognition for change.

The NHS is not short of awareness. It is not short of values language. What it is often short of is consequence.

Again and again in this series, what came through was that institutions can become very good at hearing painful stories and very poor at treating those stories as knowledge. They can listen, empathise, commission another review, produce a strategy document — and By refusing to mistake recognition for change.

That is where thinkers like Miranda Fricker help me. Her idea of epistemic injustice reminds us that institutions can fail people not only by harming them, but by failing to hear them as credible knowers of their own experience. If we do not treat lived experience as knowledge, we will keep reproducing the same blindness.

For me, action has to be structural. It has to mean redesign, accountability and follow-through — not just better intentions.

What gives me hope

What gives me hope is that there are still people in and around the NHS who are not willing to call this normal.

Throughout this series, I met researchers, clinicians, students and leaders who were asking brave questions and refusing easy answers. I found that genuinely hopeful. The younger voices especially stayed with me. Dr Malone Mukwende and Naabil Khan AFHEAreminded me that the future of the NHS is already being formed — in teaching, in placements, in what is normalised, in what gets challenged, in what the hidden curriculum quietly teaches.

I’m also hopeful because once something has been named clearly, it becomes much harder to pretend it isn’t there. That is one reason the NHS Race and Health Observatory matters so much. It has helped bring difficult patterns into view — and once a thing is visible, the question becomes not whether we can see it, but whether we are prepared to act as though seeing it matters.

Professor David R. Williams was wonderful on this too: helping connect individual injury to systemic responsibility. That is the core of hat my PhD grapples with, and it gives me hope, because it moves us beyond blame and toward action.

What keeps me going

The work is heavy. It should be, for we are talking about dignity, safety, authority, health, and the sense of what is possible. But what keeps me going is that I know the alternative to this work is silence, and silence has never been neutral.

I am motivated by patients, by colleagues, by younger generations coming into medicine, and by the possibility of helping shape a profession that is more reflective, more truthful and more just. Through WHAM, I’ve seen that many clinicians are hungry for exactly this kind of conversation. They do not just want to be told that inequalities exist. They want help thinking about what those inequalities demand of them professionally, ethically and politically.

At heart, my PhD is trying to ask what a different kind of professionalism might require: not just compassion for patients, but reflexivity about the institutions we serve, the hierarchies we inherit, and the conditions under which care is delivered.

And, truthfully, I am motivated by conversation. I love the moment in an interview where something suddenly sharpens — where a guest names a truth so precisely that you can feel the room change. And this podcast gave me so many of those moments!

What I hope listeners do differently

I hope listeners become less willing to call ordinary inequality normal.

I hope they start noticing the things that are often dismissed as small: who gets interrupted, who gets backed, who gets stretched, who gets forgiven, who gets described as promising, who gets treated as if they belong in senior space.

Behind every workforce disparity is a sequence of human decisions and missed recognitions. The figures matter but they are not just numbers. They are the statistical residue of what institutions repeatedly notice, reward, excuse and overlook.

You do not need to be a chief executive to change that. You just need to be willing to pay closer attention to what is happening around you, and to ask yourself harder questions about what you are helping to reproduce.

If this podcast does one thing, I hope it nudges people toward a more reflective kind of professionalism — one that asks not only how well we care for patients, but what kinds of institutions we are asking one another to work inside, what kinds of inequalities we are normalising, and what justice should demand of us as health professionals.

Guddi is co-founder and director of WHAM (Wellbeing & Health Action Movement), which supports clinicians to act on health inequalities in practice, and writes on Substack about medicine, inequality, professionalism and the moral questions facing healthcare today.