Equality and Diversity Council

For further information, please contact Farah Islam-Barrett or Jabeer Butt.

The Race Equality Foundation has been a member of the Equality and Diversity Council since its establishment in 2008, acting as a representative for the Department of Health's voluntary and community sector Strategic Partners.

The Council is a sub-committee of the NHS Management Board, designed to put into practice a commitment to reducing inequalities and tackling discrimination and disadvantage.  The Council seeks to ensure equality of opportunity and treatment for both NHS patients and staff, and to develop 'personal, fair and diverse' services that comply with the Equality Act.  The Department of Health website describes the Council's aims as the following:

• services focus on improvements in health outcomes and experiences, for all their community
• services are held to account by their communities for responding to the differing needs of all within them
• talent flourishes, free of discrimination with everyone having fair opportunities to progress
• all staff feel their contributions are recognised and that they count as part of their organisations
• services are demonstrably compliant with statutory duties, in letter and spirit, striving to go beyond these.

Taken from Department of Health, Equality and Diversity, 2011 (external website)

The Council includes representatives from the NHS, Department of Health, trade unions, patient groups, regulators and voluntary sector, and is chaired by NHS Chief Executive, Sir David Nicholson. 

Summary documents from meetings of the Equality and Diversity Council are available below:

• Meeting summary, 30 January 2012 (139kb PDF file)
• Meeting summary, 20 July 2011 (170kb PDF file)
• Meeting summary, 12 January 2011 (144kb PDF file)
• Meeting summary, 18 October 2010 (146kb PDF file)
• Meeting summary, 19 July 2010 (150kb PDF file)
• Meeting summary, 17 March 2010 (135kb PDF file)
• Meeting summary, 15 October 2009 (489kb PDF file)

The following documents outline the commitment to equality in NHS reforms:

• Sir David Nicholson’s commitment to ensure the NHS builds a service that is personal, fair and diverse (external website)
• ‘Breaking through’- NHS actions to secure more diverse senior leadership (51kb PDF file)
• NHS Commissioning Board- presentation from Bill McCarthy, Managing Director NHS Commissioning Board Authority (344kb PDF file)

For more information about the Equality and Diversity Council, please see the Department of Health website.