Equality and diversity

Equality Act 2010 

The Equality Act was introduced in 2010. The main aim of the legislation is to protect our employees and service users/patients from discrimination irrespective of their protected characteristics. Those protected characteristics include:

• Age
  
• Disability
  
• Gender reassignment
  
• Marriage and civil partnership
  
• Pregnancy and maternity
  
• Race
  
• Religion or belief
  
• Sex
  
• Sexual orientation.
  

We aim to provide a working environment for our staff and care and services for our patients and service users that are appropriate and sensitive to all. We continually strive to make sure that our services have equality of access and are non-discriminatory.

Our general responsibilities, both for our staff and everyone who works with us and also from our staff toward our patients and service users, are to have due regard for the need to:

• Eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation
• Advance equality of opportunity between people or different groups
• Foster good relations between people or different groups

As part of our commitment to addressing workplace inequality and following feedback through our black, asian and minority ethnic (BAME) forum we run a series of bespoke BAME career development and Master Class and coaching sessions which focuses on personal and career progress as part of our strategic organisational and talent management programme. This session is for staff looking to develop their personal and professional skills and advance further in their career.