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Equality and Human Rights Education NHS Lothian | Staff

What is best practice for equality and human rights?

The Equality Act 2010 provides us all with protection from discrimination connected to one or more protected characteristics. It states that we must reduce discrimination or disadvantage, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations.

There are many good examples of how this is happening in the NHS and we have tried to collect as many examples as we can in these pages. We hope the examples will help you reflect on your own behaviour, the culture in your team and find ways to create safe and inclusive policies, practices, and systems that we create at work.

Bias and the danger of a single story

We all have biases – opinions or beliefs about people or groups of people that influence our judgment and behaviour. We often seek out information that reaffirms these biases and ignore information that contradicts them.

Examples of bias might be believing that all Neurodiverse people are good at maths, Black people are athletic, Women are emotional or Old people are forgetful.

We are often not aware of our biases and it’s important to challenge our assumptions and stereotypes as they can affect how we react to people, how friendly we are towards them, how much attention we give them and if we take action.

Resources for reflection

Examples of good practice

Microaggressions

Microaggressions are everyday actions that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative messages towards a person or a group, based on an aspect of their identity. Repetitive instances of microaggressions (whether intentional or not – it’s the impact that matters, not the intent) can amount to unlawful harassment in breach of the Equality Act 2010.

Resources for reflection

Examples of good practice

Reasonable adjustments

The Equality and Human Rights Commission states that “Equality law recognises that bringing about equality for disabled people may mean changing the way in which employment is structured, the removal of physical barriers and/or providing extra support for a disabled worker.

This is the duty to make reasonable adjustments.

The duty to make reasonable adjustments aims to make sure that, as far as is reasonable, a disabled worker has the same access to everything that is involved in doing and keeping a job as a non-disabled person.

When the duty arises, you are under a positive and proactive duty to take steps to remove or reduce or prevent the obstacles a disabled worker or job applicant faces.

You only have to make adjustments where you are aware – or should reasonably be aware – that a worker has a disability.”

Many of the adjustments will not be expensive, and you are not required to do more than what is reasonable for you to do. Different people will need different changes, even if they appear to have similar impairments.’

Examples of good practice

Working culture

Resources for reflection