Engagement sessions and one-to-one discussions were held with staff and members of the public to seek their views on new equality objectives for the Trust, and to understand their experiences of our hospitals, specifically in relation to ‘protected characteristics’ – as defined in the Equality Act 2010.
This feedback was then used to inform our priorities for the coming years to ensure we bring our strapline to life and our Trust is a ’Great Place to Work, Great Place to be Cared for’.
The priorities for 2015/16 have been identified as:
Better health outcomes: Meeting people’s health needs appropriately, and ensuring services are free from harm
Improved patient access and experience- ensuring people are involved and supported in decisions about their care, and handling any complaint respectfully
A representative and supported workforce: fair recruitment and selection, and ensuring staff are free from things such as abuse and violence
Inclusive leadership: The expectation that the Board and senior leaders routinely demonstrate their commitment to promoting equality. Alongside this, we are working with staff to respond to the Workforce Race Equality Standard, which has been introduced nationally to ensure effective collection, analysis and use of workforce data to address the under-representation of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff in the NHS. David Wilkinson, Director of Workforce and Organisational Development, said: “Ensuring that all our staff and patients are treated equally is immensely important, and we wanted to truly understand the issues they were facing so that we could develop priorities to show what we are focusing on achieving in each year to help resolve the issues and improve the experience for both staff and patients.”
To gain valuable feedback, staff engagement sessions were held across the Trust. At these events, staff talked about any difficult experiences they had faced in work, and provided constructive feedback about how the experience for the different groups can be improved. These included things such as staff and leadership development, improved communications, better sharing of information, and raising awareness and engagement within the different groups of staff.
Five public events were also held in Lancaster, Morecambe, Kendal, Barrow and Ulverston. Many of those that attended the events represented different groups such as disability, learning disabilities, visual and hearing impairment, mental health, neurological disorders, and older age. At the public events, people openly shared their experiences of our services.
Key themes that emerged at these events were experiences of a lack of awareness regarding the needs of different groups of people, staff training, and improving access to services.
David, concluded: “We want to be ‘effortlessly inclusive’ with all staff, and patients and their families and carers. It is clear that the Trust can make huge improvements by doing some very simple things, and we have now set some very specific priorities for the year ahead, to help us achieve this. “On behalf of the Trust, I’d like to say a huge thank you to those staff and members of the public that got involved. Your input was invaluable and gave us a very important insight into the issues faced for different groups in our Trust. We will now take all that input and do all we can to make positive change across our hospitals. “We will be holding further sessions with staff and the public later in the year and will release details as soon as we can. Hopefully, even more people will choose to get involved and let us know what they think.”
Our revised equality objectives, alongside the proposed priority areas for 2015/16 were approved by the Trust Board at the end of May 2015.