We’re delighted to have been featured as a case study in the NHS Providers resource, ‘Closing the gap: a guide to addressing racial discrimination in disciplinaries’.

The resource is part of the NHS Providers’ Race Equality programme, aimed at supporting trust boards to identify and challenge structural race inequality across the NHS.

The gap relates to the disciplinary gap highlighted in the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) data. It is the likelihood of ethnic minority staff entering the formal disciplinary process compared with white staff.

Our 2021/22 WRES data submission showed no disparity between ethnic minority and white staff in relation to likelihood of entering the disciplinary process, an improvement on our data in 2020 and 2021. Therefore, the NHS Providers team spoke to Janine La Rose, our Chief People Officer, and Sara Najjuma, Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, to hear more about our work on how we’d addressed disparities in the disciplinary process.

This included; cultivating a restorative, just, and learning culture, led by our Board and senior leadership; providing ‘active bystander’ training to upskill our workforce and encourage them to challenge discriminatory behaviours; and fostering a culture of psychological safety to enable staff to speak up and raise concerns.

You can read our case study in full on the NHS Providers website.

Janine (above) will also be speaking about this at their annual conference in November, where copies of the guide will be shared.

Our involvement in the guide has been featured in trade publications including The Nursing Times and National Health Executive.