Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust (BEH) has launched a new Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy.
The document is a joint effort between the mental health trust and the Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust.
BEH outlines that its ‘primary function is to deliver excellent care for the diverse populations of North Central London (NCL)’ and that they will ‘collaborate with NHS colleagues, primary care, our local authorities, and the voluntary and community sector to deliver integrated care and prevention initiatives at neighbourhood level near to where patients and service users live and work’.
It also adds that, for staff, it will ‘create a culture where we champion and develop our staff and promote inclusion across the partnership’ between the two trusts, with a focus on ‘healthy work-life balance’, ‘collective leadership’, and ‘individual development’ opportunities.
The strategy has five main areas of focus, which align with the ‘objectives of national EDI standards (Workforce Race Equality Standard, Workforce Disability Equality Standard, Gender Pay Gap)’.
Designed in partnership with staff networks and service user groups, the five key areas of the strategy are: improve service user access and experience; better health outcomes; representative and supported workforce; inclusive leadership; and culture change mainstreaming EDI.
The first main objective – to improve service user access and experience – will see the trusts aim to ensure services are accessible to all and that all the information provided by them can be ‘adapted to meet individual needs’. They will also ‘strive to provide personalised and compassionate care while respecting different people’s needs, aspirations, and priorities’.
While, to achieve better health outcomes – the second main objective – the plan is to ‘identify where there are health inequalities’ in services and put systems in place to ‘tackle these in an open and transparent way’. Additionally, BEH wants to ‘ensure inequalities are flagged and transformed into improvement measures, which are evident in service planning’ and captured via EDI workstreams.
Meanwhile, they also aim to ensure all service users are ‘supported to achieve their health and wellbeing goals’ and want to empower those, ‘who at times may struggle to have their voices heard in society, and provide them with choices, effective advocacy, and compassion and enable them to take control of their care and treatment’.
‘We want this strategy to feel real and will continue to involve staff and service users in new and innovative ways to ensure that we have the highest possible levels of engagement’, states the trust.
Read the full plans for the strategy through BEH’s website.
