Equality commitments and objectives

Our equality commitments include:

The NHS’s Equality Delivery System 2 (EDS2)

This provides a way for NHS organisations to promote equality for our staff and those who use our services. It does this through the following key goals: 

• better health outcomes
• improved patient access and experience
• a representative and supported workforce
• an inclusive leadership 

We have adopted the above goals as our equality objectives for 2016—2020.  We will be reviewing these objectives in line with the NHS intention to review EDS2 overall, which was delayed due to the COVID pandemic. 

Our Trust-wide EDI Action Plan

We have a robust Equality, Diversity and Inclusion action plan, which has been developed through our annual equality action planning. The actions are focused on four key areas which are:

• EDI and Career Progression & Recruitment
• EDI and Just Culture
• EDI and Quality Improvement
• EDI and Service Delivery

Monitoring the delivery of the actions under each thematic area is carried out on a monthly basis, and reports are submitted to our strategy leadership.

The Workforce Disability Equality Standard (WDES)

The WDES is a set of ten metrics that will help NHS organisations to compare the experiences of disabled and non-disabled staff. These metrics are needed because evidence reports and research show that the level of reported discrimination and inequality for people with disabilities working in the NHS is higher than any other protected characteristic.

You can view our progress against the WDES metric in our WDES reports below. 

Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES)

The main purpose of the WRES is to help us review our data against the nine race equality indicators, so that we can take action to close the gaps in workplace experience between white and black and ethnic minority (BME) staff. You can view our progress against the WRES indicators in our WRES reports.

Annual Equality Data Monitoring Reports

The Equality Act 2010 requires all public authorities to publish information to demonstrate their compliance with the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) by 31 January each year. This gives us an overview of how diverse our workforce, our membership and those who use our services is. We can then see how we can improve on the work that we are doing to create a diverse organisation. You can view our reports below.

Publishing our pay gap

We are an employer required by law to carry out gender pay reporting under the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017.  From 2021, we have added to this commitment to include ethnicity pay gap and disability pay gap data.  This helps us to understand the progress we are making to narrow any gap between the average earnings of men and women, staff from different racial groups, and between disabled and non-disabled staff.  You can find our pay gap reports on our Publications page.