diversity

Driving positive change around inclusion is key to NHS recovery

Humber Teaching NHS FT celebrated the ninth Equality, Diversity and Human Rights Week (#EQW2021) - co-ordinated by NHS Employers - between the 10th and 14th of May 2021.

#EQW2021 has been a great platform for us to celebrate and show its success in moving the equality agenda forward at a local level. It also provided us with an opportunity to explore core issues driving our diversity and inclusion strategy, from changing demographics to unconscious bias in the workplace, visible leadership commitment and accountability for results.

Following the decision to cancel the #EQW2021 last year due to Covid-19, NHS Employers began looking at ways to encourage and support health and social care organisations across the system, to take part in a national conversation about how, more than ever, we need to think about the role of equality, diversity and inclusion on our road to recovery and reset throughout 2021.

To put some of their methods into practice NHS Employers have come up with a plan to theme each of the five days around one of the pledges from the NHS People Promise, which is a cornerstone of the NHS People Plan. At the heart of the plan is changing culture, with a commitment towards ensuring respect, equality and diversity within the NHS.

Working together makes the NHS stronger; it helps us meet standards, enable change and collectively invest in the creation of a diverse and inclusive workforce. This, in turn, helps us deliver a more inclusive service and improved patient care.

For us, it is important to throw away any signs of tokenism and instead look at implementing long-term measures that will attract, retain and promote diverse talent within our organisation. This requires us to action positive change, and make a tangible difference by levelling the playing field.

As such, the voice of stakeholders became a priority for us. We truly believe positive change is fostered through collaboration and coproduction; by really listening to stakeholders and working together on our equality agenda with them. In that way, our drivers for change are the experiences of our staff, patients, carers and service users.

We illustrated these beliefs in a recent workshop of ours, just before the pandemic began. Over ninety representatives joined us at the workshop, and they held challenging and emotive conversations throughout. This facilitated group work helped generate our equality actions for the year ahead, as we felt informed by our patients, staff and their families.

Another important facet of our strategy is transparency and honesty. We believe that they’re vital components when communicating with stakeholders. Feedback in these circumstances goes both ways - we hear from the stakeholders - and it was important that they also heard from us, so they fully understood our progress and commitment. Even if that progress was slower than we had hoped - honesty and transparency goes and long way with stakeholders when implementing change.

This experience has led our thinking when consulting on national equality initiatives, such as the Workforce Race Equality Standard and the Workforce Disability Standard. Here, action planning to make equality improvements in the workplace, is made in collaboration with our staff networks and other stakeholders, thus ensuring drivers for change are the experiences of our patients, staff and their families.

Driving positive change around inclusion will help ensure the NHS has a motivated, included and valued workforce; one where everyone has equal access to career opportunities and receives fair treatment in the workplace. This, in turn, will allow us to continue to deliver high quality patient care, achieve increased patient satisfaction and high levels of patient safety.

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