NHS 'failing in performance' on equality

In July 2011 the Equality & Human Rights Commission quietly published a report on how well the NHS in England has been doing in meeting its existing, pre-Equality Act, public sector equality duties.  You might have missed it in all the hubbub of reportage around the farce/tragedy engulfing News International, the Met, unopened bin bags, and the government.

Remember, the NHS is huge. In England it serves over 51 million people, employs more than 1.3 million people, and has a budget of around £100 billion.

With that kind of presence you would expect that the NHS has been trailblazing and showing the rest of the public sector how to meet if not exceed the general duties on race, gender and disability equality, as well as delivering person-centred and measurable, permanent changes in the actual experiences of people when they use the health service.  That would give the NHS a fabulous foundation from which to tackle the new general and specific equality duties covering all the protected characteristics, as set out in the Equality Act 2010.  It would give real hope to millions of people who still encounter discrimination on a daily basis, that the tide was turning and that the daily insults and indignities they face would soon be history.  It would offer real chances to the same millions that maybe, just maybe, they could soon expect to get a fair chance at getting a job and developing a career, as many others have and do.

You would expect that. 

Read the report.  On page 7 you will find that :

‘no [health] authority or trust included in the sample was likely to be fully performing on all the three duties, and most were likely to have significant failings in performance’.

On page 27, you will read :

‘…combined with the concerns regarding the ability of schemes to enable authorities to meet their general duties outlined above, increases the likelihood that inequalities across commissioning, services, and employment not only remain but also become more pronounced’.

And on page 35, the report offers :

‘given that a key intention of this assessment was to move the focus from the content of equality schemes to the achievement of equality outcomes as a key measure of performance, the lack of evidence of implementation and impact is of serious concern’.

These findings come at a time when the government has been casually butchering the provisions of the Equality Act 2010, with no real opposition being offered up in the House of Commons.  The protections offered in the detail of the first draft specific equality duties have been shredded by George Osborne in a brief frenzy of blood-thirsty, Texas chainsaw-style editing being sold, spiv-like, as removing red-tape.  Again, the inactivity of the opposition is puzzling.

George Osborne - blood-thirsty
shredding of specific equality duties

In Scotland’s NHS, we don’t have the advantage of that kind of report.  We have not a clue whether we are miles better than England – in which case we should offer to help – or that maybe we are we just as desperately bad in what we have done, and seriously ill-prepared for what we now have to do.  We are, as ever, blundering around in the dark.

Nicola Sturgeon could change that

Nicola Sturgeon could change that.  As Cabinet Secretary for Health [and she also has Equality in her handbag], she could commission a report which tells her what NHS Scotland has managed to achieve on the previous equality duties covering race, disability and gender.  It would be easy.  She has already signed off a benchmarking report in 2009 which provided a fair amount of self-assessed detail on where the NHS in Scotland was with that work. 

Before getting her officials to draft another attempt at specific equality duties for Scotland, you would expect that Nicola Sturgeon would ask them to do a fast update to that 2009 report. 

You would expect that.