Together with our values of being Respectful, Passionate and Responsible, our mission statement reflects our commitment to promoting equality and encouraging diversity to ensure that we provide an excellent service to our patients and remain a model employer.
Equality Objectives
Our equality objectives are:
- To ensure that our services provide effective and safe care that is sensitive to people’s personal and cultural needs as well as appropriate to their clinical condition.
- To seek effective feedback about the experiences of people with protected characteristics who use our services in order to improve access and experience, and improve staff awareness and communications about equality.
- To utilise the Workforce Equality Group to deliver action plans focused on improving the availability of workforce equality information. This helps us to assess our progress towards ensuring we have a representative and supported workforce.
- To ensure that Trust leaders have the right information and skills to promote equality within and beyond the organisation and to support their staff to work in a fair, diverse and inclusive environment.
Our governance arrangements aim to ensure that we have the systems in place to ensure we address the requirements of legislation, duties, standards and guidance, and measure our performance and progress towards meeting our equality objectives.
Equality and Diversity Group
This Group aims to identify key pieces of work in the Trust that will enable delivery of our equality objectives. It reports progress to the Learning from Patient Experience Steering Group which is chaired by the Chief Nurse.
The Group is chaired by the Deputy Director of Governance, and the membership includes representatives from each of our clinical directorates, Nursing, Human Resources, Communications, Information Services and other staff who have a significant role in leading this work.
Stakeholder Equality Group
This Group is chaired by the Deputy Chief Nurse and aims to contribute to the Trust’s overall equality objectives, particularly in relation to:
- The delivery of services that are accessible, responsive and appropriate to the needs of service users;
- Making a difference to the health of all groups within the communities we serve; and
- Ensuring that services observe the principle of ‘reasonable adjustments’.
The Group will receive progress updates from, and provide feedback to, the Equality and Diversity Group.
The membership includes staff and people representing the Patient Voice Group, learning disabilities services and voluntary and community organisations.
Workforce Equality Group
The Workforce Equality Group is a working group consisting of staff employed by the Trust. The purpose of the Group is to ensure that we have a diverse and inclusive workforce and that no one is unfairly disadvantaged in their career. It will address issues of equality, diversity and inclusion, focused on, but not limited to, the nine protected characteristics. In addition, the Group provides staff with the opportunity to contribute to work the Trust is doing around equality, diversity and inclusion in relation to the workforce, and ensures we meet the requirements of relevant standards.
Read our Equality Delivery System 2022: Reporting of Assessment and Action Plan 2022 – 2023