Racism, like other forms of unwarranted discrimination, whether involving staff, patients or both, damages the quality of care for patients and the quality of working environment for staff and the likelihood that people access care in the first place (Paradies et al., 2015). Racism persists even in societies that view themselves as colour blind (Bonilla-Silva, 2014) and is a problem in Europe (Goldberg, 2006) as elsewhere. In this study, we define racism as a structural, historical and dynamic system of social organization based on a hierarchal arrangement of groups of people in racialized categories (Bonilla-Silva, 1997), in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representation, and social norms work in various ways to reinforce and perpetuate racial group inequity (The Aspen Institute, 2016). Racism's structural nature implies that it is embedded within social, economic and political networks and has material consequences that perpetuate racial inequalities (Omi & Winant, 2014).