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Equality Objectives

We gather Equality Information about the 9 protected characteristics (LINK) and other relevant information to help to analyse our positioning, to inform our decisions and to help develop our Equality Objectives (LINK) related to Equality, Diversity and Human Rights.
This process helps us in our quest for securing fair treatment, inclusion and access to our services and employment, and to fulfil our requirements under the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). Most importantly, under the Duty, we need to demonstrate that the Trust and our objectives, work towards three key aims of eliminating discrimination; advancing equality and fostering good relations.

Establishing our Equality Objectives
We develop our objectives by utilising all the available evidence of our equality performance and then analysing shared themes from a number of information sources, including:

  • Reviewing NHS information and stakeholder feedback from the Equality Delivery System (EDS2) and from the actions of previous years’ Single Equality Scheme Action Plan
  • Considering the Trust’s objectives, intentions and business plan as integral to these plans.
  • Internal (staff) feedback regarding performance of, and priorities for the organisation, and feedback from the Staff Survey
  • External (patients, partner organisations etc.) feedback regarding performance and priorities as part of the EDS engagement process and Feedback from previous patient surveys and from patient experience tools
  • Initial findings of a study to examine workforce representation of BME staff

Whilst there are many potential objectives, the Trust is keen to focus its efforts on a number of key priority areas, based on their being achievable and providing the most benefit across all of the protected groups both for service users and workforce.

Our equality objectives contribute to a wider goal for the Trust of ensuring that access to both employment and services is fair and equitable for all people, and that the Trust’s workforce is competent and capable to respond to individual needs, backgrounds and human rights.

The Equality Objectives
In summary the equality objectives are as follows:

In summary these are:

  1. Better Health Outcomes for All – Services are designed and procured to meet the health needs of local communities, promote well-being, and reduce health inequalities. In particular patients who have disabilities, learning disabilities, or are from BME backgrounds.
  2. Improved Patient Access and Experience – Patients are informed and supported so that they can understand their diagnoses, consent to their treatments, and choose their places of treatment. For patients who need support in understanding or communicating with clinical staff we will develop tools to support our patients and we will measure our effectiveness.Improving the way patients’ and carers’ complaints about services are collected and seek to reduce any inequality gaps. In particular we will ensure patients with learning difficulties and or language needs are able access our services.
  3. Empowered, Engaged and Well Supported Staff – We will through providing support, training, personal development and performance appraisal ensure all our staff are confident and competent to do their work, in order that services are commissioned and provided appropriately.
    We will collect data for all our staff and measure our effectiveness on this objective by ensuring we close any gaps in the implementation of our policies in this objective area.
  4. Inclusive Leadership – We will ensure with leadership we can mainstream equality into the core business of the Trust and that there is a clear system in place for conducting an Equality Analysis on services and policy changes

NHS Equality and Diversity Competency Framework – in addition the L&D is committed to the NHS Equality and Diversity Competency Framework to recruit, develop and support strategic leaders to advance equality outcomes.

Next steps – Full action plans for each of the objectives have been developed as part of the Trust’s Single Equality Scheme, which is currently being consulted upon.

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