Introduction and legislative context
Introduction
NHS Golden Jubilee is a progressive organisation with a strong track record of promoting diversity and working with staff to ensure we establish an inclusive workplace. We recognise the value a diverse workforce brings in offering different perspectives in how we deliver high quality, safe, effective, person centred care and maintain a healthy, vibrant, and inclusive culture throughout our organisation.
The Diversity and Inclusion strategy forms an integral part of our Boards overarching aim to promote the wellbeing of staff, patients and volunteers. As such, there are a number of crossovers and interdependencies spanning across existing and future outcomes specifically focusing on the following strategies:
- Health and Wellbeing Strategy
- Involving People Strategy
- Volunteer Strategy
To date, we have made meaningful progress in our approach to mainstreaming equalities throughout the organisation with specific reference to the following achievements:
- Disability Confident Leader status since 2018
- Stonewall Diversity Champion for 10 years
- Investor in Young People Gold Award
- Formation of new Domestic Abuse Partnership
- Renewal of our Investor in Volunteers status
- Development of a new user-friendly integrated Equality Impact Assessment (EQIA)
- Embedded approach to equality in expansion works
In addition, we have maintained strong partnership with public and third sector organisations including Police Scotland, Stonewall Scotland, GCIL Equality Academy, Action on Hearing Loss, Visibility Scotland and Alzheimer’s Scotland. We recognise that people perform best when they are encouraged to be themselves and so we are intentional about supporting our staff and volunteers across all nine Protected Characteristics and beyond.
NHS Golden Jubilee is also firmly committed to ongoing development of the care and services we provide in a way that ensures equality of access. We have embedded user centred design into our approach to expansion and development of our hospital and services we provide for the diverse population of Scotland we serve. We have worked in partnership with staff to set out our strategy for further developing our approach to diversity and inclusion. This includes agreeing our equality outcomes for 2021-2025 and describing our ambition to be a leading equality employer and a leader in the design and delivery of inclusive and accessible healthcare services.
The legislative context
This strategy is underpinned by our legislative responsibilities as defined by the Equality Act 2010 and associated Public Sector Equality Duties for which NHS Golden Jubilee has a legal responsibility to have due regard 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.
