Section head
NHS Employers
NHS Employers represents trusts in England on workforce issues and helps employers to ensure the NHS is a place where people want to work. The NHS workforce is at the heart of quality patient care and we believe that employers must drive the workforce agenda. We work with employers to reflect their views and act on their behalf in four priority areas:
- -pay and negotiations
- -recruitment and planning the workforce
- -healthy and productive workplaces
- -employment policy and practice.
NHS Employers is part of the NHS Confederation and is made up of just over 200 staff, located in Leeds and London.
Equality and diversity are at the heart of the NHS strategy. Investing in the NHS workforce allows us to deliver a better service and improve patient care in the NHS. NHS Employers' equality and diversity team offers advice, assistance and support to NHS organisations.
Equality is about creating a fairer society in which everyone has the opportunity to fulfil their potential. Diversity is about recognising and valuing difference in its broadest sense.
NHS Employers has done much over the last two years to support NHS organisations in meeting their legal obligations in respect of the Gender Equality Duty. This includes guidance on undertaking equality impact assessments and also in developing single equality schemes. Much of this work has been informed and developed in partnership with our network of diversity champions across the NHS under the banner of our Positively Diverse programme. In order to ensure that other NHS organisations can learn from the work of those at the leading edge of their field, we operate a knowledge base portal where good and best practice, such as the Men's Health MOT Sessions initiated by Plymouth PCT and the Maternity Awareness Sessions can be posted.
NHS Employers also runs a highly successful equality and diversity conference where we update NHS organisations on latest developments and allow them to hear from, and to question leaders in the field.
NHS Employers believes that equality and diversity is at the centre of everything that it does. The 391 NHS organisations that we represent employ over 1 million staff between them- and over 75% of those female. Therefore, it is imperative that the strategy, policies and procedures that we adopt reflects this.
We continually consult with our customers in an attempt to ensure that the support and services that we provide to them are the right ones. In this respect, we know that they value equality and diversity very highly and we therefore ensure that this mirrored in the services that we deliver to them.