Cabinet Secretary for NHS in Scotland running two-tier employment equality cultures

Jeane Freeman, 

Cabinet Secretary for Health

Jeane Freeman, Scotland's Cabinet Secretary for Health, alongside her Cabinet colleagues and the Permanent Secretary, helps run a government employing 9,239 staff, with 700 or 7.6% of them identifying as disabled people.  This and other workforce equality information was made available by 30th April 2019 in the government's mainstreaming equality report for 2019.

Jeane Freeman also runs the NHS in Scotland, employing 164,114 people at March 2019.  Jeane Freeman does not make all of Scotland's 22 health boards tell her staff how many disabled people they employ [as well as how many staff identify as non-disabled, and how many refuse to identify their status because they don't trust their employer with it].  Instead, she and we need to read 22 employee information reports published by 22 health boards to find out what that figure is.  Jeane Freeman has never explained why she does not want that data aggregated and at her fingertips.

Of the 22 health boards, just 13 had published the required data sets by 30th April 2019.  Complying with the law on equality appears to be a low priority for much of the NHS in Scotland.  From those data sets it is possible to identify that out of the 97,170 NHS staff covered by the reports, just 1,002 staff [1.03%] identified as disabled people.

It is not that government itself is doing especially well in employing disabled people.  The government's own report compares the 7.6% of government staff identifying as disabled with a benchmark in the shape of a population figure aged 16-64 of 16.6%.

Whether Jeane Freeman and colleagues are running a 2 or 3 gold-star employment culture when it comes to disability equality in government is of no great comfort to disabled people who work in, or who would like to work in, the NHS in Scotland.  

What disabled people should demand from Jeane Freeman is that she insists the officials responsible for delivering a 7.6% employment rate for disabled people in government should be meeting as a matter or urgency with the officials responsible for running the NHS in Scotland and sharing with them the key elements of the approach which has delivered a 7.6% employment rate for disabled people.