NHS Human Rights and Equality Support

The Equality Act 2010 provides strong protections to ensure equality becomes embedded into society. Authorised public bodies, including Integrated Care Boards, have specific proactive duties to ensure proper consideration to equality is taken in all activities including decisions relating to services and employment practices.

Our dedicated Equality, Inclusion and Human Rights team is committed to ensuring people are treated equally and fairly - at work, during care and out in communities. We can provide the expert advice and support you need to implement equality and support inclusive cultures both in communities and across all your teams, in line with legislation. Our services include:

• Equality analyses and Due Regard
• Staff training
• Equality focused engagement advice and guidance
• Best practice solutions for your equality issues
• Strategies and policies advice to ensure compliance with Equality and Human Rights legislation
• Implementing NHS Equality Delivery System 2
• Trouble shooting
• Staff consultations and community engagement.

We bring:

• Development of equality and inclusion as a core part of your organisational culture and values, to build and manage your reputation.
• Support with decision-making and proportionate equality analysis - ensuring due regard to your legal duties - staff training and community engagement events.
• Advice that ensures equality, inclusion and human rights needs are fully embedded in the commissioning cycle. Through tailored training, support and guidance, we will ensure your equality analyses are thorough, timely and fit for purpose, leaving you time to focus on other priorities.
• Experience of identifying any gaps in local healthcare provision and where people could be disadvantaged in accessing services by the decisions commissioners make.
• The ability to work seamlessly within integrated teams and proactively identify where equality analyses are needed, for example, for a service redesign project, prior to changing a provider, or for other changes to services.
• A thorough, but practical approach that ensures equality analyses are in proportion to the scale of the project, the number and diversity of people they will impact.
  
  

Benefits:

Our service is not just about legal compliance. Understanding the difference in health factors across different groups is key to being able to develop and improve services to suit the varying needs of our populations. Identifying health inequalities is a key priority since only by doing so will inclusion be delivered for the whole population. We provide a comprehensive support package that takes into account policy, governance, community insight and best practice and create a tailored strategy to empower you to take informed action.

Passionate about equality of access to services and fully committed to delivering the best possible care and support for citizens, the NHS Arden & GEM CSU team is highly experienced at working across numerous health and social care organisations. We are currently working at a national level with NHS England on a number of projects to develop and promote Equality, Inclusion and Human Rights. This includes designing EDS2, supporting advisory groups on information standards, System Leader Forums for Equality and the implementation of WRES. We share best practice as part of our on-going commitment to deliver true equality in the commissioning and delivery of services.

To find out more, please click here for our Equality and Diversity Services brochure