As an AHSN network we really took a long hard look at ourselves
in terms of what the diversity agenda meant to us
particularly our role in terms of spreading innovation
and we recognise that although there's some
fantastic work that the NHS is doing in terms of diversity
within its workforce no one's really looked at the importance
of diversity within innovation and we felt
that we had a leadership role to play in that space.
So what we've done is we've done a lot of work this year
to really understand the business case
behind why diversity in innovation is so important,
important in all sectors but obviously equally important
or just as important to us in the healthcare sector
Diversity in innovation is important
when we think about people, our workforce, who they are.
We're not mono people. We have different sexualities,
we have different colours, different races,
we have different ages, we have different abilities.
We need to be thinking about that in itself being innovation,
equality, difference is innovation.
Can we harness that, can we retain our staff,
can we celebrate that difference in our staff. I think we can.
If you have a team that has just one member
of that team that shares their ethnicity
with the client or the patient the entire team
is a hundred and fifty two percent more likely
to understand the needs of that client
or patient that's against a more homogenous undiverse team.
I think that simple stat just shows us why it's important
to ensure that if we're really trying to understand
the needs of our population and we're doing
so from a position of ignorance diversity
plays such an important…
or gives us such an important opportunity
to just round out the experience not just
of the diverse members of the team but also how
that enriches everybody in the team
to understand our population in a much more holistic fashion.
The NHS Confederation is for the first time
prioritising diversity,
equality and inclusion in its corporate strategy.
We are one of five corporate priorities we’ll
be looking at making sure our members
get better at EDI, (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion)
not accepting poor equalities practice,
and we will be making sure we are supporting more
diverse leaders through both the development
of the BME Leadership Network and
the Women's Leadership Network.
We want to ensure we've got more diverse leaders in the NHS.
So we've come up with a series of pledges which can be
summarised into three areas of focus.
We have a whole raft of pledges around our organisations.
So simply put are we showing best practice in the way
that we recruit our staff in the way that we look
to ensure that we are representative of the communities
that we serve.
I'm backing the AHSNs healthcare initiative to promote
diverse innovators because I believe
innovators from diverse backgrounds based on their race,
based on their gender,
based on their ethnicity and culture provide a very
different lens for the healthcare innovations
that they're creating which is really needed not
only for the NHS and the UK healthcare system but also
when thinking about global healthcare interventions
that can be implemented and created in our
digital healthcare era.
And then there's also a number of pledges
around our work and our impact.
I think this is particularly important because innovation
has the potential to both increase or reduce inequalities
and we have to ensure that the kinds of programmes
that we're championing and helping to spread
throughout the UK are ones that have been shown
by the impact equality assessments that we're going
to do to be positive in terms of their impact on reducing
inequalities for our population.