Staff in the NHS have reported a rise in racism by patients over the past 18 months, a report based on hundreds of responses from medics has found.

The Society of Radiographers collected testimonies from 381 of its members, who either witnessed or experienced racist abuse at work.

One respondent said staff had been called “dirty foreigners” while others spoke of patients refusing to be treated by black or Asian staff.

“I have witnessed a colleague being called a monkey by a patient,” said another.

Paul Awah, a Nigerian-born diagnostic radiographer based in Bedfordshire. said: “Patients claim not to hear what I’m saying, or say they can’t understand me. English is the only language I speak, and I believe I’m clear enough when I’m speaking to patients.”

Awah, who colleagues regularly call on to assist with cannulation – inserting small tubes into veins – said three patients had questioned whether he had “done this before?”

Another radiographer told of a patient who complained he couldn’t understand another colleague who had “a mild Yorkshire accent, but was wearing a headscarf”.

They added: “What upset me the most is it hadn’t been reported to me – I just happened to hear the staff members talking through it. I felt it had happened to them so much that they just accepted it as something they had to put up with.”

The society said “increasingly hostile public attitudes to race, diversity and immigration” were behind the spike. It called on the NHS to record incidents of racism and monitor how they are dealt with.

Roughly one fifth of the NHS workforce is made up of non-British nationals, and one in four radiographers registered with the Health and Care Professions Council trained overseas.

Last month,100 civil society organisations signed an open letter to prime minister Andy Burnham to back a national anti-racism strategy.

“We are witnessing some of the highest levels of racist violence, hate crime and division in living memory,” they wrote.

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