NHS Providers
NHS Providers is the membership organisation for the NHS hospital, mental health, community and ambulance services that treat patients and service users in the NHS. It helps those NHS foundation trusts and trusts to deliver high-quality, patient-focused care by enabling them to learn from each other, acting as their public voice and helping shape the system in which they operate.
NHS Providers has all trusts in England in voluntary membership, collectively accounting for £115bn of annual expenditure and employing 1.4 million people.
Race Equality programme
NHS Providers' Race Equality programme supports boards to effectively identify and challenge structural race inequality as a core part of the board's business by:
- Creating hearts and minds change through building personal awareness and understanding of racial justice and anti-racism.
- Increasing leaders' confidence and capability to act through sharing evidenced-based practices, empowering leaders to proactively challenge the impact of structural racism and seek opportunities to advance race equality.
- Encouraging leaders to take accountability through sharing accountability mechanisms, enabling leaders to self-reflect, educate, and ensure sustained progress is made with a focus on outcomes.
The programme delivers a range of events for trust leaders, bringing together subject matter experts, examples of evidenced-based practice, and peer learning opportunities. It offers a range of resources, on topics including inclusive recruitment and talent management, data and accountability, and allyship. These resources have equipped leaders to have authentic conversations about race, challenging both themselves and other board members to drive progress and reduce inequality.
Hempsons
Hempsons, a specialist health and social care law firm working across the public, private and third sectors, acts for over 200 NHS organisations nationwide on strategic and operational issues including integrated care, collaborations, service reconfigurations, patient safety, estates projects and workforce.
Delivering trusts the advice, support and guidance needed in today's uncertain and volatile healthcare employment arena, Hempsons' NHS, health and social care employment solicitors offer an exceptional depth of knowledge and experience derived from always having worked within the health and social care sectors.
Hempsons is a longstanding partner of NHS Providers and supports them on a range of activities where legal issues are an important consideration. With its extensive experience in employment law, Hempsons brings a unique legal perspective to understanding and closing the disciplinary gap. Hempsons lawyers are passionate about using their experience to help trusts address this issue which is a crucial part of any organisation's work on anti-racism as well as for promoting diversity, inclusion, and equality within the NHS workforce, and for ensuring that all staff are treated fairly and equitably.
NHS Providers' language
The NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) report uses the term 'Black and Minority Ethnic' to describe ethnic minority staff. NHS Providers uses the full description 'black, Asian and minority ethnic' or 'ethnic minority' as preferred descriptions to denote the same aggregation where disaggregation into more appropriate, distinct categorisations of ethnicity is not possible.