The Race Equality programme provides resources for you and your board on the race equality agenda. Our events, blogs, guides, podcasts, articles, reports and video interviews are designed to share learning and good practice amongst board leaders. We will regularly add resources to this hub so please check back for updates. If you have any case studies or resources you would like to share about your race equality journey, please contact the team.
NHS Providers insight report told us trust boards find it challenging to develop their ethnic minority talent pipelines. There is a need to share learning from evidence-based interventions that improve equality within recruitment and talent management processes. Such interventions can act as a gateway to diversifying leadership and can improve the retention of ethnic minority staff. These events and resources are designed to support trust leaders to develop inclusive recruitment and talent management practices which also deliver sustainable improvements against their Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) indicators; advancing race equality in their organisations.
Both The Hewitt Review and The Messenger Review recognise that successful organisations need clear accountability at every level to achieve meaningful and defined outcomes. In our insight report we found that only 4% of trust leader respondents felt that race equality is fully embedded as a core part of their board’s business. Our case studies from NHS organisations highlight how others have embedded accountability for anti-racism at a provider and system wide level.
As part of our insight report, trust leaders asked NHS Providers to support white chairs and chief executives to have conversations about race, helping them develop a greater understanding of what it means to be anti-racist.
Through these events and resources, we have shared how white leaders are, as a result of their personal buy in, enabling conversations about race, fostering safe spaces and developing in their role as allies. By providing examples on 'why' and 'how' to act, we hope to give trust leaders the confidence and capability to embed race equality as core business within their organisation.
As an extension to allyship, encouraging leaders to talk about race and have greater awareness on why we need to focus on race is important to create safe spaces and improve understanding of racism within the NHS. By talking about race, it can promote hearts and minds change, give leaders the confidence and capability to act, and foster both personal and board level accountability.
Through these events and resources we hope to spark conversations about race, facilitate peer learning, and catalyse action.
Health inequalities have worsened over the past 10 years, and we have seen evidence of wide inequalities in how people access healthcare, and the outcomes they experience as a result.
The links between racism and its subsequent impact on health outcomes were brought into stark focus by COVID-19 in 2020. Ethnic minority populations have been found to have a significantly higher risk of death than those of white ethnicity (Census and Marmot review).
Alongside our Health Inequalities programme, we hope these events and resources will support leaders to make sense of race and health inequalities, and embed this as part of 'core business'.
16.5% of NHS employees are international recruits, the majority of which are from an ethnic minority. It is important that trust leaders can retain and support their IEW, and take proactive steps to understand and address the challenges they face as they join the NHS workforce and navigate life in the UK. By March 2024 trust leaders will need to sure that they have implemented a comprehensive induction, onboarding and development programme for IEW, as in line with actions in NHS England's Equality Diversity and Inclusion improvement plan.
If you have any questions about the programme and how it could support your trust, a case study to share, or would like to speak with our team further about any of the resources, then please do get in touch.
