King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has published its first Roadmap to Inclusion, running from 2022 to 2024, to set out their plans to make King’s a more inclusive place for staff and patients and to build on their commitment to put equality and diversity at the heart of their work.
The document lays out King’s staff and patient profile, featuring statistics on factors such as gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. It goes on list King’s achievements in the area so far, such as creating and appointing a new Director of EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) and introducing Active Bystander training to empower staff to respectfully challenge inappropriate behaviours..
Moving on, the document then provides a summary of King’s ambitions, split into four key groups: brilliant people, outstanding care, leaders in research, innovation and education, and EDI at the heart of everything. Under each heading, it lists key objectives:
- attract, retain and develop passionate and talented people, creating an environment where they can thrive through actions such as properly incorporating EDI into workforce induction and wellbeing programmes, introducing training and mentorships, and launching King’s reasonable adjustment plan to make work more accessible by allowing staff to explore potential changes to help them thrive.
- deliver excellent health outcomes for patients and ensure they always feel safe, cared for and listened to, by launching the health inequalities project to reduce disparities in access and outcomes through an enhanced approach to providing and responding to patient feedback from underrepresented groups, and developing and implementing best practice guidance for co-designing services with diverse communities.
- continue to develop and deliver world-class research, innovation and education by providing the best teaching and bringing new treatments and technologies to patients; patient demographic data will be enhanced to include other protected characteristics, participation of underrepresented groups in research will be increased, and diversity will be increased in research teams.
- proudly champion diversity and inclusion at King’s, acting decisively to deliver more equitable experiences and outcomes, through actions such as formally imbedding EDI standards and introducing a cultural intelligence programme.
The document provides an action plan to showcase how King’s plans to achieve its ambitions, linking projects to specific aims in the roadmap and defining “how we will do it” along with measures of success.
To read the roadmap in full, please click here.
