This week marks the eighth anniversary of Equality Diversity and Human Rights Week (#EQW2019), the national platform for organisations to highlight the work done to create a fairer and more inclusive NHS for both patients and staff.
Diversity covers a wide area, ensuring that equality is reached across race, gender, disability and LGBT. Such terms cover a range of issues and in short essentially sets out that we are trying to achieve equality across all individuals to ensure fairness and opportunities open to all, no matter what their background.
This week highlights the importance of various industries across the board, both private and public, and emphasises the need for reviews of policies to ensure that they are moving in the right direction to promote diversity and equality within these businesses.
Over time, we have seen improvements. Examples include the significant improvement and movement within the NHS, through the work carried out by NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard, and the legal industry where we have seen great work carried out by The Law Society, specifically around ‘Women in Law’.
Having grown up in a family of doctors working in the NHS and pursuing my route into law, historically, it has been evident that there have been struggles and difficulties to ‘break the glass ceiling’. Reflecting back and delving further into the history, it is refreshing to see such positive movement within these two fields and others.
The Mary Seacole Trust continues to support this work through our ‘Diversity and Leadership Programme’ following our recent review, carried out by MST Ambassador, Dr Habib Naqvi, ‘Race Equality in the Workplace: A Review of Theory and Practice’. Read it here.
We continue to develop such programmes to ‘move the needle’ on diversity and endorse dedicated weeks to promote positive developments.
We would welcome your comments and thoughts in continuing to promote diversity, positive movements made within your industries.
