Summary and background
The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on progress against the Workforce Disability Equality Standard indicators and propose future actions. These actions will form part of the Trust’s Equality Objectives and overarching Equality Diversity & Inclusion Work Plan for 2021 and beyond.
The WDES was first mandated in July 2018 and it builds on the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES), which was introduced in 2015 but focuses on disability. The WDES seeks to promote the concept of disability as an asset, as research has found that disabled people have a poorer experience of working in the NHS in England than non-disabled colleagues. The WDES standard is also cross-referenced to the Equality Delivery System 2 (EDS2) to support performance review, set equality objectives and deliver on the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). The PSED sets out the ‘general’ and ‘specific’ duties on public authorities as indicated below:
The general duty to
- Eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation, and other conduct prohibited by the Act
- Advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not
- Foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not
The specific duty to
- Publish equality information at least once a year to show how they’ve complied with the equality duty.
- Prepare and publish equality objectives at least every 4 years
To put the WDES into context the NHS People Plan states that in order…
‘… to embed the important interventions that improve the experience of our people, we will develop a new offer with our people setting out explicitly the support they can expect from the NHS as a modern employer…’
This will be framed around the broad themes of:
‘… creating a healthy, inclusive and compassionate culture, enabling great development and fulfilling careers, and ensuring everyone feels they have voice, control and influence…’
The interim plan then expands on
‘Creating a healthy, inclusive and compassionate culture’ by setting out ‘action to improve equality will need to run through all elements of the work on this new offer. This will include further action to embed the Workforce Disability Equality Standard…..’.
Implementing the WDES will help the trust to
- Improve understanding of inequalities experienced by disabled staff
- Create fairer, more anti-discriminatory environments and cultures which foster the engagement, involvement, inclusivity of disabled staff
- Provide better workplaces and services to patients and service users
- Enable the Trust’s commitment to meet the Equality Act’s ‘Public Sector Equality Duty’
- Help the NHS to deliver the government’s pledge to increase the levels of disabled people in employment
There are 10 WDES indicators which improvements are based on
- Workforce data (3 indicators)
- Questions from the NHS Staff Survey (5 indicators)
- Engagement and voices of disabled staff (1 indicator)
- Disability representation on Boards (1 indicator)
Recommendations
Adopt a program of review and development to include recommendations for change across all of the ten WDES indicators
Incorporate data from the WDES outcomes and develop a specific WDES action plan indicating all areas that need improvement
Download the Workforce Disability Equality Standard (WRES) (884kB pdf)