Kate Green – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Kate Green on 2016-01-25.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps the Government has taken to increase the number of BAME (a) executive and (b) non-executive staff of (i) NHS trusts, (ii) clinical commissioning groups and (iii) related arms length bodies since 2012.
Jane Ellison
In 2014, NHS England, in partnership with the National Health Service and arm’s length bodies, developed a Workforce Race Equality Standard which requires NHS organisations to demonstrate progress against a number of indicators of workforce race equality, including a specific indicator to address the low levels of Black and Minority Ethnic representation at Board level.
Since April 2015, the Standard has been included in the NHS contract for providers, and it will feature in the new assessment framework for clinical commissioning groups for 2016/17. The Standard has also been included in the Care Quality Commission’s inspections of provider organisations.
In addition to supporting the implementation of the Standard, the arm’s length bodies are also applying it to their own workforces. Further information on the NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard can be found at:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/about/gov/equality-hub/equality-standard/
The Department keeps diversity in focus throughout the appointments process for non-executives of arm’s length bodies. The Department’s “Non-Executive Appointments Diversity Action Plan” is published annually which outlines progress and actions to improve the diversity of public appointments and can be found at:
Cabinet Office publishes annual diversity statistics on new public appointments made by United Kingdom Ministers at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/diversity-in-public-appointments#history
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