Equality & diversity

The NHS is here for everyone and everyone should have equitable access to its services. North East Lincolnshire CCG is committed to ensuring equality and diversity is a priority when planning and commissioning health and social care services in our region.

Equality and Diversity is about making sure where necessary we have measures in place to support the nine protected groups to meet their individual needs (please see below for further details on these protected groups.)

North East Lincolnshire CCG is working hard to ensure not only that its services are appropriate and accessible for all members of our community but that no one is disadvantaged or discriminated against by the services we put in place.

Discrimination can be either:

Direct - when someone receives less favourable treatment because of a protected characteristic (please see below)

Or

Indirect - when a condition or rule, policy or practice disadvantages people who share a protected characteristic.

Equality and Diversity is about ensuring everyone is treated fairly and not discriminated against either in the planning or delivery of services.

Equality & Diversity in North East Lincolnshire

As an organisation and as an employer, we aim to treat people as individuals in accordance with their personal needs.

In accordance with the general duty of compliance with the Equality Act 2010, our organisational objectives include:

The protected characteristics covered by the Equality Duty are:

In addition to these characteristics, we also consider socio-economic circumstances (deprivation) and caring responsibilities when assessing the impact of our policies and services

In the North East Lincolnshire area, we are committed to publishing information that demonstrates our compliance with the Public Sector Equality Duty.  The information published here includes, in particular:

Information relating to people who share relevant protected characteristics that are affected by our policies and practices and information relating to our employees.

Equality Objectives

As a CCG we recognise that effective communication is an essential element of effective, quality care. In order to optimise health and care outcomes for all groups with protected characteristics we have created and consulted on the following specific objective for our commissioner and provider organisations:

We will ensure that all groups with individual communication needs will receive information and be supported to make meaningful decisions about their health and care through clear, appropriate and quality communication

This will include:

• Provision of information in languages and formats that are appropriate to the individual
• Support for verbal communication in the form of appropriate high quality interpretation
• Timely facilitation of health and care consultations supported with relevant communication aids

Read the Equality & Diversity Policy  

How we put our Equality and Diversity approach into action

Through ongoing engagement we have developed links with local groups representing individuals with protected characteristics and reach out proactively to these groups to ensure we involve and engage with them on relevant issues. We want to make sure we listen to protected groups as much as we can so that we can design our services and commission our providers to take into account people’s needs. More information can be found in our Engagement Strategy.

NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES)

We welcome the introduction of the NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) and see it as a useful tool to identify and reduce any disparities in experience and outcomes for NHS staff and job applicants of different ethnicities.  This is important work as research evidence shows that improving workforce race equality in the NHS will lead to better healthcare for everyone and better use of NHS resources.

North East Lincolnshire CCG has been working with local provider organisations and equality groups to ensure that WRES is implemented in a meaningful way. Our WRES report describes any workforce inequalities linked to ethnicity in line with the WRES standards. Please read the WRES report

We have included actions related to the WRES in our local Equality and Diversity plan and we are planning to take part in a regional CCG WRES implementation group to fill any data gaps and to draw up an action plan describing interventions we will make to improve workforce race equality.

For further information please contact lisahilder@nhs.net
 

Useful Resources

Useful Links

Equality Publications