Equality & Diversity
Managing Equality and Diversity is core to how the Trust operates to delivering clinical care that is patient centred.
Equality is about creating a fairer place where everyone can participate and has the opportunity to fulfil their potential. We aim to create an environment where discrimination on the grounds of race, gender, religion, disability, age or sexual orientation is not tolerated.
Diversity is about recognising and valuing of difference in its broadest sense of our patients, staff and visitors. It is about creating a working culture and practices that recognise, respect, value and harness difference for the benefit of our organisation and the individual.
By adhering to this, we commit to being a first class service provider, meeting the changing needs of our community and responding to change in a timely and appropriate fashion.
Our Commitment
The Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre (NOC) is committed to providing equal opportunities and valuing diversity by:
- Respecting everyones differing aspirations and commitments in life.
- Providing a safe environment for patients, their visitors and our staff where discrimination of any type will not be tolerated.
- Ensuring that vulnerable people including children and adults have equal rights to protection and the Trust will endeavour to prevent any foreseeable harm and act upon any suspicions of harm or neglect in accordance with safeguarding policies.
- Striving to provide an environment in which people want to work.
- Enabling each member of staff to reach their full potential in a culture characterised by dignity and mutual respect and one in which people enjoy working.
- Respecting privacy, dignity, confidentiality and diversity when delivering the best possible care to all our patients and/or carers.
- Expecting visitors to our organisation to embrace and uphold our commitment to the achievement of equality and diversity for everyone.
- Ensuring that to the best of our ability we meet the individual needs and expectations of our patients.
- Promoting family friendly working practices.
- Consulting with patients and employees, including those from minority groups about how we can improve equality of opportunity and support diversity to reduce health inequalities and improve the health of our community, patients and staff.
- Publishing the NOC's Single Equality and Human Rights Scheme and Action Plan to outline how we will improve equality of opportunity and support diversity of our patients, the local community and our staff.
Our Actions
Our Equality and Diversity Steering Group ensures our ongoing commitment is translated to action using the Single Equality and Human Rights Scheme (SEHRS). This means providing greater ease of access to our services for patients and the community. We will attract and retain the most creative and committed staff, harnessing productivity to deliver excellent patient care through a diverse workforce that is representative of both our community and patients.
View our SEHRS here
Our Progress
Over the past 12 months the NOC has continued to demonstrate its commitment to promoting and valuing equality and diversity in the workplace, specific developments include:
- The BME leadership development programme was developed as a response to reviewing the ethnicity of our staff and appointments made at senior levels against our wider population. Thhis programme was developed to enable the NOC to harness and grow its own BME talent and enabling our BME staff to progress to senior management levels within the NOC and continue to enhance the patient experience.
- Safeguarding, the NOC has worked closely with the Oxfordshire Safeguarding Boards (adults and children). This has led to the development of a suite of internal training programmes with defined competencies being developed.
- During 2010 the NOC in consultation with staff and patients developed a set of values that is local to the NOC which makes a clear commitment to Equality and Diversity as a core value.
Further details can be found in our Equalities Annual Report here.
Our demographics
The local Oxfordshire population, and that of Thames Valley, is relatively affluent and relatively healthy. Oxfordshire's population is estimated at 632,000 and is projected to grow by 2.8% over the next five years.
Longer range projections suggest that there will be a very significant increase in the numbers of older people. The population aged 85 and over is forecast to increase by 85% to 25,800 between 2008 and 2029, and the number of people between 65 and 84 is forecast to grow by 48% to 121,800. It is expected that West Oxfordshire and the Vale will see the highest growth i.e much of the growth in numbers of very elderly people will be in rural areas.
The proportion of the population from a Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) background in 2006 was on average 7.7%. This conceals a variation from 1.6% in rural South Oxfordshire to 16.6% in Oxford itself.
View patient demographic detail by :
Equality Impact Assessments
Equality Impact Assessment [EIA] is the primary function to determine the extent to which policies, procedures, practices and services impact upon individuals and groups in relation to one or more of the equality categories [gender, age, sexuality, religion or belief, disability, transgender and transsexual people]. If the policy, procedure, practice or service is found to have an adverse impact, the author/s or service developers must consider all other alternatives, which may more effectively achieve the promotion of equality of opportunity. This may include the development of specific measures to mitigate the adverse impact.
If you wish to see a copy of a particular policy or Equality Impact Assesment, please contact the Equality and Diversity Team.
Equality Impact Assessment Policy
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