NHS offers no sanctuary for religious equality

It started with me taking a look at the Scottish Government's 'equalities evidence' portal on its web site.  I sampled some 'evidence' on race equality and concluded: 'Bollix, this is a con'.  For more on that, read my blog 'NHS unable to evidence race equality as an employer'  

Having discovered huge holes in the data needed to evidence race equality in the NHS, I thought it would be worth looking at that other area not much talked about over the dinner tables in polite company in Scotland - religion.

I returned to the same data source I used before - published by the NHS in Scotland on an equalities profile of its workforce at March 2012.  You then have to follow a link on page 35 to get the figures.  I thought the lack of data on the ethnic profile of the NHS workforce was pretty bad.  With religion, we have massive data gaps, with barely enough to stitch together for a cover up of Nicola Sturgeon's equality shortcomings.

Across the whole of the NHS in Scotland, 47.3% of staff [over 73,000 people] do not want to reveal their religion.  There are wild variations within this overall picture.  

In NHS 24 the data gap is at 83.4% - less than a fifth of staff feel ready to share the identify of their religion.  In NHS Scottish Ambulance Service the data gap is at 69.9% - less than a third of the staff in that Board feel comfortable about identifying their religion.  In NHS Lothian, the gap is 68.1%, whereas in NHS Health Scotland the gap is a thumping 66.8%.  In NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, Scotland’s largest Board, the gap is 51.9%.  Overall, 10 of Scotland’s 22 health boards are unable to persuade more than half their workforce to positively [and safely ?] reveal their religion.

On the basis of this data, it is obvious that the NHS in Scotland as an employer is a long way from being able to claim, through evidence, that it has eliminated discrimination on the basis of a person's religion.  That it has not managed to build good quality data on the religious identity of its workforce would suggest that NHS staff feel unsafe about disclosing this information, and that part of their concern is an apprehension about facing discrimination.