This paper aims to promote practice development in the difficult area of managing patients' expressions of personal racism within the clinical environment. Racism is a global phenomenon and it is well documented that nurses experience racism within their routine practice. Nurses face unpleasant dilemmas in managing racist patients who are also vulnerable because of their health status. The paper is based on the ethnography of acute mental health nursing, conducted within a UK hospital. The study found that nurses conceptualized patients' expressions of racism as a consequence of their mental ill-health and that they managed this difficult issue through nursing methods of direct engagement, trouble avoidance and the minimization of strangeness. It is concluded that patients' racism cannot be managed by following simple, procedural rules but neither should it be managed 'behind closed doors'. A culture should be facilitated in which nurses can feel secure that colleagues and managers will take their concerns about personal racism extremely seriously and engage with, and value their contribution in working out just what to do in specific cases. The nursing methods discussed can be used as a basis for practice development in this unpleasant and uncomfortable area.
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing.