NHS Providers
NHS Providers is the membership organisation for the NHS hospital, mental health, community and ambulance services that treat patients and service users in the NHS. We help those NHS trusts and foundation trusts to deliver high-quality, patient-focused care by enabling them to learn from each other, acting as their public voice and helping shape the system in which they operate.
We have made a public commitment to become an actively anti-racist organisation and to create an organisational culture where all our people feel safe, valued and can achieve their potential. Our internal race action plan is led by our senior management team with actions for all directorates, including training our managers on inclusive leadership and recruitment and ongoing reviews of our learning and development plans to ensure equitable access to development opportunities across the organisation. We have recently embarked on creating a competency framework to ensure we provide a transparent framework to support talent management, career development and progression. We are committed to reporting on our ethnicity pay gap on an annual basis and using this as a key metric to drive further progress towards our commitment to provide a fair and equitable workplace for all staff
Race Equality programme
In addition to our internal work on race equality, NHS Providers' Race Equality programme supports boards to effectively identify and challenge systemic race inequality as a core part of the board's business by:
- Creating hearts and minds change through building personal awareness and understanding of race inequality and anti-racism.
- Increasing leaders' confidence and capability to act through sharing evidenced-based practices, showing what works/ what good looks like, empowering leaders to proactively challenge the impact of systemic racism and seek opportunities to advance race equality.
- Encouraging leaders to take accountability through sharing accountability mechanisms, embedding work on race equality across existing work, enabling leaders to self-reflect, educate, and ensure sustained progress is made with a focus on improving outcomes.
The programme delivers a range of events for trust leaders and offers resources on topics including inclusive recruitment and talent management, data and accountability, and allyship.
Hempsons
Hempsons, a specialist health and social care law firm working across the public, private and third sectors, acts for over 200 NHS organisations nationwide on strategic and operational issues including integrated care, collaborations, service reconfigurations, patient safety, estates projects and workforce.
Delivering trusts the advice, support and guidance needed in today's uncertain and volatile healthcare employment arena, Hempsons' NHS, health and social care employment solicitors offer an exceptional depth of knowledge and experience derived from always having worked within the health and social care sectors.
Hempsons is a longstanding partner of NHS Providers and supports them on a range of activities where legal issues are an important consideration. With its extensive experience in employment law, Hempsons brings a unique legal perspective to understanding and closing the ethnicity pay gap. Hempsons' lawyers are passionate about using their experience to help trusts address the ethnicity pay gap which is a crucial part of any organisation's work on anti-racism as well as for promoting diversity, inclusion, and equality within the NHS workforce, and for ensuring that all staff are treated fairly and equitably.
As an employer, Hempsons is committed to creating a workplace which provides equal opportunities for development and progression for all of its staff. Hempsons has been voluntarily publishing its gender pay gap report since the legislation was first introduced in 2017.
Those involved in recruitment at Hempsons undergo mandatory equality and diversity training and unconscious bias training. The firm also actively seeks to recruit from non-traditional educational backgrounds through its (fully funded) solicitor apprenticeship programme, which allows apprentices to gain the skills they need to perform the job and work towards a recognised qualification as an alternative to the traditional training contract route. For those already in post, Hempsons publishes career progression structures and competencies which promote equality for all colleagues to pursue clear and transparent pathways to progression.
To get in touch with Hempsons, please email clientservices@hempsons.co.uk
NHS Providers' language
NHS England when referring to ethnicity, use the term 'Black and minority ethnic (BME)' across both the NHS Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Improvement Plan (the Plan) and the NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard for consistency. NHS Providers uses 'ethnic minority' as a preferred description to denote the same aggregation where disaggregation into more appropriate, distinct categorisations of ethnicity is not possible.