Equality Duty Compliance Statement 

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NHS Bolton is fully committed to delivery of equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes for patients, carers and staff from each of the local protected characteristic groups within Bolton.

We are determined to achieve this by offering equally fair opportunities to access healthcare and employment for the local communities we serve. The PCT will eliminate unlawful (prohibited) discrimination as defined within the Equality Act 2010.

The PCT aims to make these duties transparent by publication of new equality objectives by 6 April 2012.

NHS Bolton has established a range of structures and systems of support. We have Equality Target Action Groups (ETAGs) made up of local people who can give feedback and advice on gender, age, sexuality, disability, faith and religion, race and ethnicity, and issues affecting carers. All new policies, strategies and proposals coming to the Board are required to have an Equality Impact Assessment looking at the risks they might affect differently on different groups of people, and how these risks can be monitored and reduced. Management Team has agreed that any paper without an equality analysis will not be approved. The Equality and Diversity Steering Group is responsible for assuring Board that the PCT is compliant in this area.

We will actively engage with patients from local equality and diversity groups, giving them a voice to scrutinise for any adverse impacts for protected groups, arising from key changes made by NHS. One way we achieve this is through ETAG network and via community networks.

We include equality and diversity demographic questions in our engagement, and disaggregate data by these groups. See here for the latest Annual Duty to Report on Consultation.

We completed a fully verified assessment again NHS North West’s Equality Performance Improvement Toolkit. NHS Bolton self assessed overall as “Developing” with two areas as “Achieving”. The assessment against this toolkit enabled the PCT to identify gaps in performance and make plans for improvement and also to benchmark our performance against other NHS Trusts across the region.

For NHS Bolton’s EDHR performance in 2010 using the EPIT process, follow the links for:

Public Health Survey Results

A thorough understanding of the health needs of the local population is essential if we are to plan and provide the appropriate services to improve the health of people in Bolton. To help us do this, we carried out our third health and lifestyle survey within the adult population of Bolton over the past decade. More information on these surveys can be found below. Data disaggregated by ethnic group can be found here. The survey data has also been looked at by gender, age, disability and sexuality for the JSNA.

Training and development

A new extensive package of equality training was rolled out last year for staff including deaf awareness, theatre based equality awareness, integrating equality into for business (for managers), age awareness training, equality monitoring workshops, sexual orientation training, refugee and asylum seeker awareness training and more.

PCT Board members participated in an equality and diversity visioning exercise for and a training programme was commissioned for senior managers to raise awareness of equality and diversity and key requirements, and to also build knowledge and skills in relation to implementing issues relating to equality into core business. Staff have been trained to recognise and appropriately address stereotyping.

Bolton Health Consortium (CCG) Board members have undergone equality and diversity training to build knowledge about equality and diversity in the discharge of the CCG’s functions.

Our primary care partner organisations are offered equality and training opportunities, which have included British Sign Language courses for practice staff and introduction to the equality duties.

Employment Statistics

As part of our legal duty and commitment to the equalities agenda we annually publish our workforce data broken down by (pay bands), ethnicity, age and gender and where currently possible by disability, religion and sexual orientation. Our latest HR report can be found here.

Due to the transfer of our community staff to Bolton NHS Foundation Trust in July and the separation of staff on Electronic Staff Record (ESR) system, the data was not readily available between July and December. However, the next HR report will break down data by all the protected characteristics.

Service Access

This data is currently being collated.