Does Scotland's NHS have a burning desire for equality ............ for Catholics ?

We may have stopped killing Catholics because they are Catholics and instead confine ourselves to celebrating the death of Catholic who have rebelled against the status quo by burning Guido Fawkes in effigy, but it is not clear that the five centuries since have really changed attitudes towards employing Catholic people in the public sector.

Not too long ago, the Glasgow Herald reported that Tom Devine had claimed that Catholics in Scotland aged below 55 had reached equality in work with other Scots in the 1990s.

In 2013, public bodies published profiling data on their workforce which suggested that things have either changed radically since the 1990s or that the data used then by Devine was less than robust.

In 2013, Scotland's 32 Councils published data which showed that just 1.69% of Scotland's local authority workforce identified as Catholic.  This at a time when the 2011 census was revealing Scotland's Catholics as making up 15.9% of the population.

In the NHS, at 2013 the proportion of people identifying as Catholic and working across the 22 health boards was 7.63%.  Two years later it has crept up to 10.00%.

Scotland's universities in 2013 offered similar dismal evidence of discrimination against Catholics.  Just 0.97% of workers in all universities identified as Catholic.  Edinburgh University, where Tom Devine worked until last year, offered a miserly 1.77% of the workforce as being Catholic.

Since devolution, Scotland's senior public sector apparatchiks have managed to convince themselves sectarianism and discrimination against Catholics is somehow magically confined to the week-ends when some football clubs play each other.  This is the same kind of lazy, arrogant, Wasp-like analysis which informed the work of Visit Scotland in 2013.  

When challenged over the fact that they employed just 1 Catholic out of a workforce of 763 workers, they could not accept there might be sectarianism in their corporate culture.  This was the same organisation which a few years previously were caught out airbrushing in a black face to what was originally an all-white Homecoming poster.

Not only did Visit Scotland fail to accept the potential of sectarianism in their employment culture then, they reported earlier this year that the proportion of Catholics in the workforce has increased, massively, from just 1 in 2013 to 2 in 2015 [see page 39 of the report].  

In carrying out the research for the 2015 report into Catholics and employment in the NHS, it was observed that few if any Boards appear to have systems in place for gathering evidence on patients/service users cross-referenced to their identity by protected characteristic and checking whether their experience of access to, experience in and outcome from health services has been free from discrimination.

A health board delivering services where Catholic people experience barriers, discrimination or sectarianism is unlikely to be an employer where Catholic people find they are free from discrimination, sectarianism or have equality of opportunity – and vice versa

In the same way that it is possible to conclude that the prevailing culture in the NHS on meeting the specific equality duties on employment is one focused on the process rather than on change to the lived experiences of people from the protected characteristics as employees or would-be employees, so too can the absence of joined up work/evidence gathering between NHS Board functions as employers and service providers be regarded as a fundamental and fatal flaw in work to deliver equality.  Such an attitude and approach ignores the ineluctable synergy between the two functions and the cultures of organisations where discrimination exists.  A health board delivering services where Catholic people experience barriers, discrimination or sectarianism is unlikely to be an employer where Catholic people find they are free from discrimination, sectarianism or have equality of opportunity – and vice versa.