Equality and Diversity
Reducing Health Inequality, Promoting Equality, Improving Quality
As a public body, Lewisham PCT has a duty to elmininate discrimination and promote equality across all of its functions, including the delivery of its services and its employment practices. As part of this duty, we are required to develop equality schemes - documents that outline what actions we will take to ensure that individuals, communities and staff are treated equitably.
As the Government’s forthcoming Single Equality Bill will bring together all existing equalities legislation, we felt that our policies on equality and diversity should reflect this change. To this end, Lewisham PCT has not only used existing data and intelligence to review and update its Race, Disability and Gender Equality Schemes but has combined them to form a Single Equality Scheme.
The process of producing this Single Equality Scheme has given us a further opportunity to consolidate past work on equality and diversity to date and agree key priorities for the next three years. These priorities have been identified as areas where we currently need to make the most progress. These areas are:
- Supporting targeted action on health inequalities
- Embedding Equality Impact Assessment
- Commissioning for equity
- Improving equalities data collection
- Ensuring equality in recruitment, retention and progression
- Building staff capacity
- Consulting and engaging our communities
Single Equalities Framework
Discussions between key local organisations has resulted in a borough-wide commitment to develop a single equalities framework. This work will support each individual organisation’s requirement to develop and publish schemes and enable us to work collectively, with the community, to promote equality and access to services and employment.
Single Equality Scheme 2008 - 2011 (PDF)
Single Equality Scheme 2008 - 2011 (MS Word)
