The NHS must take into consideration several equality duties contained in section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 .
Section 149 replaced existing duties concerning race, disability and sex. It extended coverage to the additional “protected characteristics” of age, gender reassignment, religion or belief, pregnancy and maternity, sexual orientation and, in certain circumstances, marriage and civil partnership.
Equality impact work in Path to Excellence Phase Two
Our preliminary work on the published working ideas to date shows that those groups which are more likely to be impacted by any changes to location or working arrangements are those which:
- Are more likely to need or use the health services
- Are known to experience discrimination in health care
- Have financial difficulties relating to travel and transport
- Face difficulties travelling to new places particularly alone or at night, (for a variety of reasons including stress, discrimination, violence)
- Have communication or cognitive difficulties affecting NHS access or use-
- Provide care or are in need of care / social support –
- Face social exclusion compromising effective engagement
You can read the Path to Excellence Phase Two: Preliminary impact assessment document in the Health Inequality and Equality Impact work page of the Publications section.
Involvement with protected groups
The programme is working with lots of different community groups to ensure people are involved in giving their views. In particular encouraging small organisations representing those with protected or specific interests to get involved with running focus groups on ideas being developed.
This work builds upon the relationships developed in phase one of the programme and in work carried out earlier in phase two where 12 focus groups were carried out with a range of specific interest groups.
The objective was to actively seek people’s views on what’s important to them in relation to specific health conditions and how specialist care can be improved, and/ or consider each working idea in more detail and gather people’s views and comments on what they thought was important to be considered as the working ideas are considered.
You can read a report on Path to Excellence Phase Two focus group activity by going to the Feedback reports section of this website