Annual report 2010/11 - East Cheshire NHS Trust

EQUALITY AND HUMAN RIGHTSEquality and fairness for allWith the support of Five Boroughs Partnership Trust, thetrust has made considerable progress in further embeddingequality and human rights across the trust. Introducingequality as a session on the statutory and mandatorytraining programme has ensured that 90% of staff havereceived some form of training in this area. Specialisttraining has continued with the aim of ensuring staff areaware of their responsibilities under the new Equality Act2010 and to ensure our staff are equipped to deal with thediffering needs of people from the different equalitystrands. Members of the Trust Board have attended adevelopment session on equality and human rights.Reviewing how we are doingReview of the Dignity and Rights Group resulted in thedecision to disband this group and look at ways of makingequality part of the business of the trust, rather thandealing with it in a separate arena.Equality impact assessmentsOver the past year we have reviewed the impact assessmentprocess and this has led to improved training in this areaand improvements in our policies and service impactassessments. Examples of where this has made a differenceinclude:• Post death procedures policy. Partners are now detailedalongside relatives so that same sex couples are notdiscriminated against. Also, the need to take account ofthe different requirements of different faiths is nowreferred to earlier in the policy.• Making changes to our day case lists to segregate sexes• Possible identified impact on waiting times.Awards and commitments• The trust has once again successfully retained the ‘Positiveabout disability’ status, (two ticks) awarded by JobcentrePlus. The trust was commended on the standard of itsapplication.• Signing up to Stonewall‘s Diversity ChampionsProgramme last year, the trust was assessed against theworkplace equality index. The trust came 320 out of 378organisations who applied. In looking at this result interms of NHS organisations who applied, the trustperformed better than other NHS organisations whoapplied in the following areas:- Workforce monitoring and follow up- Bullying prevention- Access to training.Areas for further development are community and staffengagement and procurement.• To demonstrate commitment to the mental healthagenda, the trust signed up to the ‘Mindful Employer’scheme.• Becoming a member of the Gender Trust has been helpfulin developing the trust’s transgender policy for bothservice users and staff.• Continuous improvement of the quarterly workforcemonitoring reports enables us to have a clear pictureacross the equality strands of race, age, disability, sexualorientation, gender, religion and belief.• The trust is committed to listening to its staff,demonstrated by the ‘Your Voice’ consultation, whichshowed that our Muslim staff felt that prayer facilities inthe trust were inadequate. Following this a focus groupwas held. Issues raised included: reviewingaccommodation for prayer, putting Holy books and rosarybeads in communications boxes on wards anddepartments. And developing a patient and staff leafleton what facilities are available.Learning disabilitiesBuilding on the work undertaken during 2009/10, trust staffhave continued to work in partnership with David Lewis,Rosendale Trust, East Cheshire Advocacy and Cheshire andWirral Partnership Trust to further improve care for patientswith learning disabilities and their families. This culminatedin achieving runner up status in the partnership workingcategory in the Guardian Public Services Awards and beingnominated in the North West Positive Action Awards.5253