NHS unable to evidence race equality as an employer

It started with someone pointing out to me that Scottish Government had added an ' equalities evidence' portal on its web site.  My reaction was 'Wow, that will put us at the top of the class in the context of equalities' and couldn't wait to explore it. I did.  My 'Wow' was quickly replaced with 'Bollix, this is a con'.  


What government has done is bring together a wide range of existing research and data sources, some of them directly, some of them indirectly, offering access to data on equality.  You will struggle to uncover 'evidence' that the experience of people who encounter discrimination on a daily basis has been or is being changed.  This is mostly because in order to show evidence you have to have systems in place to capture data on people, their equality profile, and their experience of services or their outcomes from accessing those services.  Very, very few public bodies are anywhere near having these systems in place, either temporarily through such as surveys or, if they are mainstreaming equalities, as a permanent feature of how they work.


Take just one example.  Using the 'evidence finder' offered in the portal, you can end up looking at data published by the NHS in Scotland on an equalities profile of its workforce at March 2012.  You can end up looking at some of the workforce equalities data [age and gender are not apparently recognised in the report as equalities criteria] but what you will find is a total lack of analysis of what the data means and thus an equally total lack of evidence that equality is happening in the NHS Scotland workforce.  Don't just take my word for it, have a look for yourself - follow the link shown on page 35 of this report.

The head count of staff employed by NHS Scotland at March 2012 was 154,366 [excluding GPs].  35.6% of the workforce did not identify their ethnicity.  In some Boards this reluctance or even fear of identifying ethnicity is at astonishing levels.  In NHS Lothian the lack of data on the ethnicity of the workforce is said to be at 57.4%.  In NHS Education Scotland, the gap is 53.8%, while in NHS Scottish Ambulance Service it is at 57.2%.  Across the entire NHS in Scotland, just 2.3% of people identify as being BME.  In other words, out of 154,366 staff, just 3,859 people are comfortable about identifying as BME.

On the basis of this data, it is simply not possible for the NHS in Scotland to claim, through evidence, that it has eliminated racial discrimination.  That it has, after decades of legal obligations on race equality, not even managed to build good quality data on the ethnicity of its workforce would suggest that it remains institutionally and structurally racist.