We live in a modern world so I was not surprised to be contacted by a student through Face Book. She was doing a presentation and referring to an article I had written on Equality and Diversity in Health and Social Care. She asked if I could tell her what my motivation was for writing the piece. This is what I said in reply.
I wanted to say that Equality and Diversity is not an optional extra in Health and Social Care services and explain why. Because some people seemed to be saying we were spending too much time and money on E&D when the training budget was being cut, workloads were increasing and there were so many changes happening. My answer was no it is really important and this is why......
The full article was published in Ethnicity and Inequality in Health and Social care vol1 issue2 December 2008 published by Pavilion. Here is an extract
Equality and Diversity as a way of delivering the wider Health and Social Care agenda
My passion is equality. It seems to me that equality is what the public sector is all about. It is the emphasis on the moral case for equality rather than the legal or business case that makes the public sector different from the private sector, the not for profit sector and the voluntary sector. For me it is obvious get equality and diversity right and all else follows. If equality and diversity in recruitment is right you will have a workforce that reflects the diverse population you serve. If you recruit people who do not all come from the same background, hold the same beliefs and think in the same way you are more likely to have the creativity and insight to respond to the challenges of providing services to a diverse population. You are more likely to be customer focused if your staff recognise different sections of the community want their needs met in different ways and you are more likely to have people who can think of different ways of meeting needs. Of course this will only be realised if you have managers skilled in managing a diverse workforce. This requires focusing on developing managers' people management skills. It also requires developing a safe working environment - one where staff feel able to challenge and be challenged.
Staff who are customer focused quickly realise you need a range of providers and services to meet a diverse population's needs. That means working with a range of partners and it is often those in the voluntary, community and faith sector who are most able to cater for the small localised niche markets. If you get equality and diversity right you will have developed your listening skills as an organisation and so you will have the right approach to engaging communities and working in partnership with the voluntary, community and faith sectors. Such skills will stand the organisation in good stead for promoting community cohesion.
Am I over stating the case to make my point? Transforming the public sector means radically changing the way people behave in the organisation. It means engaging staff at every level in doing things differently and it requires people to be inspired. Leagues tables have limited motivational appeal, so does saving money. Claiming the customer is king is hard to maintain in the face of hospital closures, cuts in services, removing children from their parents or admitting someone into a psychiatric ward against their wishes. And despite the traditional emphasis on charismatic leadership front line staff don't do it for the chief executive. In fact in the public sector staff tell us in staff surveys they don't trust senior managers, they don't do it for the money, they do it for the people they serve and they do it because they want to make a difference. The challenge is to maintain this public sector ethos when services are contracted out to the private sector or to the “third sector “a cross between the private and voluntary sectors. The challenge is to maintain this sense of commitment to the general good rather than the bottom line. The challenge is to do this at the same time as the public sector is adopting many of the methods and much of the language of business. What better/clearer way of doing this than focussing on fairness because that's what equality and diversity is all about. Fairness in how we recruit people, fairness in how we select people for promotion, fairness in how we treat people at work, fairness in how we allocate scarce resources and fairness in how we provide services. Fairness is relevant, fairness inspires.
Of course fairness is a principle and the tricky bit is applying it in the real world but that is the challenge for the organisation; that's what everyone should be working on.
