Inclusion

Welcome to our page on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion! 

At the NHS Leadership Academy, we aim to lead on making Inclusion a reality within the NHS. We’ll do this through investment in excellent, knowledgeable and compassionate leadership. We hold the principles of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the heart of everything we do and all that we stand for. We are guided by the NHS People Plan, which commits to Fostering Belonging and tackling the discrimination faced by minority groups in the NHS.  

The NHS is a universal service, and we are committed to developing a leadership community which is representative of the groups that we serve. We know that diversity and inclusion lead to improved health and greater staff and patient experiences of the NHS. To this end, we welcome the challenge of enabling staff from all backgrounds to develop and excel in their roles.  

In our leadership development programmes, we aim to eliminate any disadvantage based on age, disability, marriage, civil partnership, race, culture, religion or belief, lack of religion or belief, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, maternity or any other minority characteristics.  

We aim to achieve these goals by: 

Making the case for a diverse and inclusive NHS and presenting the evidence to support this 

Working with the best national and international experts on inclusion to bring cutting edge thinking and innovation into our work 

Ensuring that our programmes and tools support our aims for inclusion 

Ensuring that programme participants are increasingly drawn from, and are at the very least appropriately representative of, the diversity of our workforce 

Continually improving the content of our programmes to ensure that inclusion shows up in relevant and powerful ways 

Developing our practitioners so they’re best placed to share learning about inclusion 

Setting extremely high standards around inclusion when recruiting staff and practitioners, and expecting the same from our partner organisations 

Bringing challenge to the wider system with regards to leadership for inclusion and being at the forefront of developing new ways to inspire and bring about sustainable change on inclusion through research, practice and engagement 

As a provider of leadership development courses, our diversity and inclusion projects consist of: 

Ensuring that our courses are accessed by a diverse range of South-West staff, 

Supporting staff from minority groups in progressing to senior roles, overcoming the historical and current oppressive barriers imposed on them by unequal structures, supporting for example the NHS England and Improvement’s commitment to achieving 19% ethnic minority staff across all pay bands by 2025,  

Giving a platform for marginalised staff in the South-West to share their personal stories, and encourage organisational change through storytelling, 

Producing learning materials which are accessible to disabled colleagues and are inclusive of the wider South-West and its neurodiversity, 

Reviewing the content of our learning materials to remove any content bias towards historically privileged theorists and researchers, 

Allocating our financial resources in an ethical manner, striving to commission trainers from diverse backgrounds,  

Conducting Equality Impact Assessments of our programmes, to proactively identify non-inclusive features and mitigate them before our programmes are finalised. 

A review of our cohort demographics in 2020-2021 revealed that the following groups are under-represented in our programmes: 

Transgender participants, 

Participants under the age of 35 and above the age of 55, 

Participants who are ethnic minorities, including non-British learners,  

People who are on parental leave. 

We have identified the above communities as our positive action groups and over the next 12 months we will strive to increase their participation and visibility in our programmes. We will also be supporting the Leadership Academy’s national positive action programmes. 

We are committed to  addressing historical oppression, and making the NHS a great and dignified place to work in, a place free of bullying, harassment, discrimination and oppression.  

We strongly encourage you to contact the Inclusion team to help co-build our Inclusion strategy and so that our Inclusion work can be a true co-created partnership – Contact us.