Equality Delivery System

Welcome to the Equality Delivery System (EDS).

East of England Ambulance NHS Trust is committed to providing the best possible quality of care and service for patients and to be the employer of choice for staff.

In order to do this we embrace our Public Sector Duties to:

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

This commitment is made across all the protected characteristics recognised under the Equality Act 2010 : Age, Disability, Gender, Gender Reassignment, Marriage and Civil Partnership, Pregnancy and Maternity, Race and Nationality, Religion and Belief, Sexual Orientation.

Our overarching equality, diversity and human rights strategic objective is:

“To be an employer of choice, committed to equalities, encouraging all staff and volunteers to adopt the Trust’s values in working towards its strategic objectives, whilst capturing and using data to ensure fair access by patients to services and people into employment”.

Our specific equality, diversity and human rights objectives.

The Trust’s specific equality objectives have been developed using and reflecting the best available evidence at the time when we completed our intial Equality Delivery System grading and analysis.  They are that, through working inclusively we will:

1.  Continue to listen to people who are marginalised; improve accessibility and deliver the right services that are targeted, useful, useable and used in order to improve patient experience.

2. Increase the diversity and quality of the working lives of the paid and non-paid workforce, supporting all staff to better respond to patients’ and communities’ needs.
 
3. Raise awareness of and promote action on the equality and diversity agenda amongst all managers and staff.

4. Demonstrate that our decisions are effectively informed by up to date community/workforce data and intelligence.

Equality Delivery System Grading

Following a grading workshop with the Trust’s interest group, the organisation has identified a grade for each outcome from the EDS Grading system. View our EDS grading sheet here.

Having reviewed the grades, the interest group supported us in identifying the four key priority outcomes and actions for 2012/13 and has also provided input into our strategic objectives going forward.

Our Priority Equality Delivery System (EDS) Outcomes

 
The Trust’s EDS user group supported the following 4 outcomes as priorities for 2012/13.

• Individual patients’ health needs are assessed, and resulting services provided, in appropriate and effective ways
• Patients and carers report positive experiences of their treatment and care outcomes and of being listened to and respected and of how their privacy and dignity is prioritised
• The workforce is supported to remain healthy, with a focus on addressing major health and lifestyle issues that affect individual staff and the wider population
• Boards and senior leaders conduct and plan their business so that equality is advanced, and good relations fostered, within their organisations and beyond

The Trust will develop an implementation plan for 2012/13. The plan will address our objectives in the context of these four outcomes and ensure that relevant activities from our Single Equality Scheme are transitioned into the new objectives and priority areas. The development of our EDS has been an informative and iterative process, and further consideration of our overarching strategic objective will take place through our Board later this year as part of an annual report on all EDHR activities during 2011/12 . The Board most recently considered the objective above in December 2011, but the continuing development of this area has resulted in the possibility that a slightly different strategic objective may be more representative of the Trust’s ambition in this critical area.

The Trust therefore recognises that there will need to be a review the Equality, Diversity and Human Rights objectives in the coming months to ensure it captures these changes and fully reflects and embraces our public duties. Following formal Board approval we will update our objectives on the public website and publish our Equality, Diversity and Human Rights implementation plan.

Further information

For further information please click the links below:

• EEAST Equality Assurance Report 
• EEAST Single Equality Scheme document
• Department of Health webpage for EDS
• The Equality Delivery System for the NHS
• Nine easy steps to implement the EDS
• EDS for the NHS