Our plan for 2023-24: Equalities, diversity and inclusion

About

Since 2020, we have committed to applying an Equalities, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) lens across our work. To ensure we live up to this commitment, we publish an organisational action plan annually, setting out our approach.

In May, we published our updated strategy for 2023-2026, Our Future Focus.

During the development of this work, it was clear that we needed to:

• Continue to focus on the unfair and avoidable differences in health across the population and between different groups in society; and
• Regularly demonstrate where our work has led to reductions in health inequalities.

Our commitment to EDI is reflected in the first of our three strategic objectives:

This document outlines the steps we will take in 2023-24 to achieve this.

Our National Committee scrutinises our delivery to help ensure we meet our objectives and live up to commitments that we have set. Our EDI plan for 2023-24 builds on our previous work and includes a renewed emphasis on understanding the impact of inequalities, including financial hardship.

Our objectives

Our plan aims to ensure that we meet our commitments to addressing EDI.

We will:

1. Ensure that all our research, policy and communications work will continue to be designed to deliver impact that addresses issues relating to EDI.
2. Ensure we continue developing an evidence base that focuses on demographics and geographic spread to reflect the communities we represent accurately.
3. Involve more people from affected communities in our work and form partnerships to help make change happen.
4. Ensure that our communications are accessible and successfully reach the audiences we are trying to target.
5. Support local Healthwatch to build the skills and evidence they need to challenge local health and care decision-makers to improve EDI.
6. Foster a workforce culture that promotes and embraces EDI and demonstrates exemplary practices around equity.

Delivering our objectives by area

Policy and research

In our policy and research work, we will prioritise support for people with the most significant and complex needs, as well as tackling issues that affect the whole population.

As part of this, we will have a renewed focus on the cost of living and deprivation while ensuring that we continue to consider protected characteristics such as ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality and disability and the intersectional nature of the factors that lead to inequalities. We will involve more people from affected communities in our work and form partnerships to help make change happen.

We will:

• Improve our sampling from the most deprived communities to ensure we are capturing those most impacted by health inequalities. In 2023-34, we will conduct a gap analysis of the volume, quality and geographic spread of data shared with us. This will support ongoing efforts to ensure our evidence is more reflective of target communities and allow increased use of sampling of our data. 
• Publish cancellations research that highlights that disabled people, neurodivergent people, younger people, people on lower incomes, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex and Asexual people (LGBTQIA+) , and ethnic minorities were the most likely groups to have experienced two or more NHS cancellations.
• Publish findings of waves three and four of our cost of living research highlighting the barriers to care faced by those struggling with financial hardship.
• Publish qualitative research on maternal mental health – developed in partnership with PANDAS Foundation (Pre and Postnatal Depression Advice and Support).
• Scope plans for a work programme on women’s health, particularly the health of women of colour.
• Deliver a social care campaign focusing on the experiences of groups of people who draw on social care support - disabled people, older adults, and unpaid carers.

Communications

In our communications approach, we will use channels and partnerships to ensure we reach diverse audiences.

We will:

• Develop a new campaign platform to target those facing health inequalities in partnership with Care Quality Commission (CQC).
• Continue to try and make our communications as accessible as possible for the communities we serve.
• Track and promote national policy wins on inequalities and develop case studies demonstrating real-world impact for the public. We will compare areas and show the effects of approaches that prioritise inequalities.

Support for local Healthwatch

We will promote local Healthwatch interventions on EDI and understand the impact that they are having. We will share good practice so that all local Healthwatch can identify health inequalities issues in their area and deliver work that highlights and addresses these.

We will:

• Support local Healthwatch to be more reflective of the diverse communities they represent. In 2023-24 we will establish a baseline understanding of the levels of diversity across local Healthwatch so we can track trends in subsequent years.
• Review the network roadmap on EDI to see if we are providing the right support.
• Ensure that addressing health inequalities is a key feature of commissioning guidance for local Healthwatch.
• Support local Healthwatch to collaborate on tackling inequalities.
• Ensure EDI is integrated into our core skills and learning and development offer to local Healthwatch with opportunities to share best practice at events for Healthwatch.
• Draw on examples of local Healthwatch impact, including tackling inequalities, to influence and inform policy decisions at a national level. We will replay these to local Healthwatch and track how national policy successes are locally implemented.

Workplace culture

We aim to demonstrate exemplary practice when it comes to embedding Equalities Diversity and Inclusion in our culture.

We will:

• Evaluate the effectiveness of the Equality Impact Assessments we apply in our project planning and work, and improve these assessments.
• Produce an organisational development plan to ensure equity in training and development.
• Review our recruitment processes to ensure that we attract a more diverse range of candidates.
• Promote vacancies via channels with a reach into diverse communities.
• Deliver regular training for staff on EDI and ensure staff have channels where they feel comfortable raising any issues of concern.
• Deliver the second half of our EDI training programme to cover recognising and avoiding microaggressions, delivering an inclusive, equitable workplace and inclusive leadership.
• Work with CQC to get a deeper understanding of the demographics of our workforce and address where we have under- or over-representation of groups.