The government's equality strategy 'Building a fairer Britain' is underpinned by the two principles of equal treatment and equal opportunity.
By eliminating prejudice and discrimination, Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust can deliver services that are personal, fair and diverse and a society that is healthier and happier. For the NHS, this means making it more accountable to the patients it serves and tackling discrimination in the work place.
Given the multi-cultural nature of the population it serves, and the staff it employs, our trust is committed to ensuring that equality and diversity is at the heart of all we do. This means ensuring equality and diversity in the delivery of services to our local community, and ensuring equality and diversity in employment opportunities and employment practices.
Why is equality and diversity important to us?
• We wish to provide greater ease of access to our services for the community we serve.
• We wish to recruit and keep the most creative and committed staff to work with us from all groups.
• We have amoral and legal obligation.
We are keen to ensure that our services recognise and deliver culturally sensitive, inclusive, accessible and appropriate services which make a difference to individual lives and to ensure that the services we provide do so without discrimination. We are committed to ensure that our approach to our staff is the same as our approach to our service users being open and transparent, focussed and valuing.
What is equality and diversity?
Although sometimes use interchangeable, the terms ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ are not the same.
Equality is about making sure everyone is treated fairly and given the same opportunities. It is not about treating everyone the same way as they may have different needs to achieve the same outcomes.
Diversity means ‘difference’. When it is used in the same context as ‘equality’, it is about recognising and valuing individual as well as group differences. It is also means treating people as individuals and placing positive value on diversity within the community and within the workforce.
Meeting our legal duty
As a public sector organisation, Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust has a statutory requirement to ensure that diversity, equality and human rights are embedded into all our functions and activities as per the Equality Act 2010, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the NHS Constitution.
As a public sector organisation, Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust has a statutory requirement to ensure that diversity, equality and human rights are embedded into all our functions and activities as per the Equality Act 2010, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the NHS Constitution.
The Equality Act 2010 patients’ rights to a comprehensive and fair NHS replaced the existing anti-discrimination laws with a single Act. The Act is now a key part of the legal framework that underpins the way the NHS provides its services and supports its staff.
From 2012, public organisations, including NHS trusts, are required to publish information which shows they are meeting the requirements of the Equality Act 2010, the general duty being that we publish:
Information about Equality and Diversity Workforce Compliance can be found by clicking here.
We are currently working on the data regarding Information about our healthcare services and our patients.
Click here for information on our equality objectives.
The Equality Act 2010, patients’ rights to a comprehensive and fair NHS replaced the existing anti-discrimination laws with a single Act. The Act is now a key part of the legal framework that underpins the way the NHS provides its services and supports its staff. The Equality Act outlaws discrimination against the following protected characteristics:
• Age
• Disability
• Gender reassignment
• Marriage and civil partnership
• Pregnancy and maternity
• Race (including nationality and ethnicity)
• Religion or belief
• Sex (gender)
• Sexual orientation
Our vision for equality and diversity
We intend to build on the progress we have made to ensure equality and diversity in both service provision and employment, and to achieve a significant change in our performance on equality and diversity outcomes via the Equality Delivery System (EDS).
What is the Equality Delivery System (EDS)?
The EDS is a toolkit to help all staff and NHS organisations understand how equality can drive improvements, strengthen the accountability of services to those using them, and bring about workplaces free from discrimination.
The EDS is to support the trust to deliver better outcomes for patients and communities and better working environments for staff, which are personal, fair and diverse. The EDS is all about making positive differences to healthy living and working lives so that everyone counts.
At the heart of the EDS is a set of 18 outcomes grouped into 4 goals. These outcomes focus on the issues of most concern to patients, carers, communities, NHS staff and boards. It is against these outcomes that performance is analysed, graded and action determined.
For the full document, please see The Equality Delivery System for the NHS.
The equality and diversity pages explain how our trust intends to ensure equality, diversity and human rights in service provision and employment.
These pages will therefore be reviewed and added to on a regular basis. We welcome any suggestions from staff on other information or advice they would like to see added. Please email any suggestions to: polly.sharma@bsmhft.nhs.uk
