Equality Act 2010 – The Duty to publish equality objectives
By 6th April 2012 public organisations – including NHS Trusts – are required to publish equality objectives which will demonstrate how the duties in s.149 of the Act – the public sector equality duty – will be fulfilled.
The Black country cluster is committed to playing our full part in contributing towards the NHS vision of providing a personal, fair and diverse health care service. We believe that Equality should underpin all decisions that we make as commissioners – embedding this into the processes we use to make and implement decisions, the culture that we create for our staff and the quality of services that we commission through a diverse range of providers.. We believe in an approach of working towards removing the barriers that limit people, respecting diversity and difference and recognising a human rights approach.
The NHS is currently undergoing significant change as set out in the Government’s Health and Social Care Act. As part of these changes Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) are being established to organise services for their local populations, supported by a national NHS Commissioning Board. The cluster is currently developing the arrangements that need to be in place within the new NHS architecture to ensure that the focus on equalities is maintained during the transition. As part of this work the Cluster is working with its CCGs to ensure that the leadership for this agenda is embedded in the local leadership of these emerging bodies and that they are effectively resourced to undertake this role.
The links below:
• show the equality objectives we will take forward as a Cluster
• show how each Primary Care Trust is working towards meeting its public sector equality duty
• highlight some of the main information sources used to help guide and inform the commissioning decisions taken across the Black Country
• offer some examples of the work undertaken with local communities and partner organisations to promote equality matters.
Within the documents there are further links to some of the information sources used, and to documents which evidence the work which has been done.
A guide to the Equality Act is available here, with the Act itself available here, and more detailed explanatory notes about it are here.
Equality Objectives for Primary Care Trusts in the Black Country Cluster