Our equality, diversity and inclusion strategy sets out our approach and commitment to making sure equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) is at the heart of everything we do:

• How we deliver health and care services for our population.
• How we commission such services.
• How we engage with the people we serve.
• How we manage our workforce.

Our strategy recognises NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB) is a new statutory body and is in the process of developing its wider priorities and ambitions.

This means there’s still lots of work to do to develop our actions around EDI and the health inequalities affecting our communities. However, we have lots of good practice to build upon and an ambition to address these matters.

We will draw upon the skills, knowledge and experience of our population and our diverse workforce to further develop this work in the coming years.

The overarching purpose of this strategy is to:

• Explain our approach and ambitions around EDI
• Set our equality objectives
• Fulfil our legal duty

The strategy contains a set of interim equality objectives. These objectives are designed to set out a range of initial commitments in relation to EDI while the emerging ICB (and the wider ICS) continues to develop and firm up its long-term priorities and ambitions over the coming year.

OBJECTIVE 1: Our commissioned and provided services will meet the needs of our diverse population

We want to ensure that the services we design, commission and deliver are accessible to all and meets the individual needs of our diverse patient population. Patients accessing the services we commission should not face disadvantage and should have a positive experience. To ensure this, we are committed to considering the voices and needs of our diverse population in the design of our services.

OBJECTIVE 2: Our workforce will see improvements in health, wellbeing and diverse representation

The development of a more inclusive and representative workforce forms a key part of our People Strategy. However, as a newly established organisation, the ICB recognises that it needs to focus its efforts on understanding the makeup of its new workforce, as well as that of its system partners in order to work towards the vision of ‘one workforce’ across the ICS.

We have an ambition to create an inclusive environment for our staff that fully promotes and celebrates diversity in all its forms and allows staff to bring their whole self to work. To achieve this ambition, we need to ensure that our organisation is representative of the diverse communities it serves, and that everybody has equitable access to support, development and progression opportunities at all levels within the workforce.

We know from workforce analysis of our predecessor CCGs that there are areas of significant under-representation within certain groups of staff, along with a reluctance for staff to self-report their diversity monitoring data around certain protected characteristics such as disability and sexual orientation. As an ICB, we will take positive actions to improve workforce representation and encourage staff to provide us with up-to-date diversity monitoring data.

Furthermore, we will use mandated standards such as the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES), the Workforce Disability Equality Standard (WDES) and Gender Pay Gap reporting to monitor and drive our commitment towards improving workforce representation.

OBJECTIVE 3: Our leaders will demonstrate a clear and strong commitment to EDI in all that they do

In order to create a truly inclusive organisation at all levels, we need to ensure that our leaders demonstrate a strong commitment to EDI and lead by example.

Our leaders will evidence their commitment to EDI by demonstrating an awareness of their own biases, and by proactively considering different views and perspectives to inform the way they make decisions.

Every one of our leaders will take ownership of the EDI agenda and promote and support the organisational vision around EDI at every available opportunity.