Equality and diversity

Welcome to our Equality and Diversity section. This section contains information about our commitment to ensuring that our patients, visitors and staff are treated fairly and have equal access to services and opportunities regardless of the nine characteristics protected by the Equality Act:

• Age,
• Disability,
• Gender reassignment
• Pregnancy/ maternity,
• Marriage/ civil partnership
• Race
• Religion/ belief
• Sex
• Sexual orientation

Our general duties

As a public sector organisation, Yeovil District Hospital is statutorily required to ensure that equality, diversity and human rights are embedded into all our functions and activities as per the Equality Act 2010, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the NHS Constitution. In all aspects of our business we will have due regard to the need to working towards achieving the General Duties set out in the act:

• Eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and other conduct prohibited by the Equality Act 2010.
• Advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not.
• Foster good relations between people who share protected characteristics and those who do not.

This means that we should work towards removing or minimising disadvantages suffered by people due to their protected characteristics; Take steps to meet the needs of people from protected groups where these are different from the needs of other people; and encourage people from protected groups to participate in public life or in other activities where their participation is disproportionately low.

Specific duties

To allow us to achieve the General Duties the following Specific Duties must be achieved:

• Publish Information showing that the 3 aims of the General Duty have been considered
• Publish evidence of equality analysis undertaken
• Have clear Equality objectives
• Publish details of engagement undertaken

How will we achieve this: Working towards the Equality Delivery System?

The Equality Delivery System (EDS) is a tool that has been developed by the NHS for use by organisations that commission and provide NHS services. We will use the EDS in partnership with patients, the public and staff to review our equality performance and to identify future priorities and actions.

The EDS consists of four goals - 2 for patients:

1. Better health outcomes for all

2. Improved patient access and experience

and 2 for staff: 

3. Empowered, engaged and included staff

4. Inclusive leadership at all levels

The goals are underpinned by 18 outcomes which are more specific questions/statements about how we provide our services and work with our staff to achieve equality in these for everyone regardless of the nine characteristics protected by the Equality Act.

The following report: How we perform against the NHS Equality Delivery System is Yeovil District Hospital’s report on what we are doing/going to do to achieve the EDS outcomes. Within this report we have set out the following for each outcome:

The evidence on how we are doing; overall and for people with protected characteristics and how our patients and staff are involved and engaged in decisions that we make.

We have graded ourselves on how we are doing; using the views of our patients and our staff, and also set out some key areas for how we think we can improve. These will be put into an action plan for us to work on over the coming year(s).

As part of our legal obligations and to inform our work within the EDS we have also published information about our patients and our workforce: please click the following links to access these reports:

• CQC inspection report September 2011
• Yeovil District Hospital Inpatient data 2011.
• CQC Patient survey report 2010
• Yeovil District Hospital “your care” survey data 2011
• Equality Delivery System conference feedback report   Please note this is currently in draft format.
• Yeovil District Hospital NHS Staff Survey Results 2010
• Yeovil District Hospital Workforce monitoring report 2010/11
• Yeovil District Hospital Employee workforce data 2011
• Yeovil District Hospital Recruitment data by protected characteristic
• Yeovil District Hospital Equality and Diversity Objectives 2012-13

We have now completed our Equality and Diversity Objectives, which show the work that we will be completing during the coming 12 months and can be viewed by clicking the relevant download link shown below.