Pharmacists have been banned from referring to patients who faint as suffering from ‘blackouts’ – because it may be seen as racist.
In what critics are calling woke ‘language policing’, a union has given staff a list of terms to avoid due to their ‘racial undertones’.
Other phrases frowned upon include describing a shunned colleague as a ‘black sheep’, or saying unregulated drugs were bought on the ‘black market’.
Additionally, pharmacists should avoid referring to the use of coercion or intimidation to obtain treatment as ‘blackmail’.
The list was compiled by Nav Bhogal, a member of the Pharmacists’ Defence Association’s BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) network.
Entitled ‘Addressing racial undertones in the language of pharmacy’, he tells colleagues that the words have become ’embedded in our professional vocabulary’.
But they also have ‘associations with race, power dynamics, and negativity’ which ‘can be harmful’.
The intervention on the website of the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) – the trade union for pharmacists – comes amid anger at the spread of ‘woke’ language guides.
Earlier this year the British Red Cross was accused of having been ‘hijacked by political extremists’ after issuing an ‘inclusive’ language guide clamping down on phrases such as ‘ladies and gentlemen’.
Meanwhile NHS trusts have told midwives to use the term ‘chest milk’ as an alternative to breast milk and ‘birthing parents’ rather than ‘mothers’.
Slamming Mr Bhogal’s guide, Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union, said: ‘Penalising old white men for using racially insensitive language doesn’t improve the lives of poor black people one iota. It’s just performative virtue signalling.’
The guide lists terms which – according to Mr Bhogal – associate ‘black’ with ‘something negative or forbidden’, and ‘white’ with ‘something positive or permissible’.