East Cheshire NHS Trust has signed an anti-racism statement, pledging to uphold zero tolerance towards racism in any form.
This commitment reflects the Trust’s dedication to fostering a safe, respectful, and inclusive environment for everyone in its care and workforce.
The statement reinforces ongoing efforts to promote equality and diversity, ensuring that discrimination is not tolerated and that all individuals feel valued and protected within the Trust’s services.
Becoming an unapologetically anti-racist organisation, begins first and foremost with an acknowledgement that racism exists within society.
As a health care provider, we have a responsibility to ensure racism cannot influence or impact on an individual’s healthcare journey, or indeed a colleague’s experience of work.
The demographics of East Cheshire as a community and indeed those of our own organisation are predominantly White and its likely many of our staff, patients and service users may have benefited from privilege. That does not mean we assume colleagues and patients throughout our community haven’t experienced discrimination or hardship, but rather it is an acknowledgment that it is unlikely many of us will know what it is like to be racially profiled or unfairly stereotyped. Sadly, that has not always been the case for colleagues and our patients from Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic communities.
Indeed, in our own organisation, we accept but will continue to strive to improve the findings of our Workforce Race Equality Standard report and associated NHS Staff Survey which highlight that Black Asian and Minority Ethnic colleagues don’t always have the same positive experience of work compared to their White peers, as reflected in the statistics to the right of this statement.
Racism can be systemic, institutional and in almost every case, personal. We will overcome this by empowering our colleagues to report incidents of racism and to reject discrimination, leaving them safe in the knowledge that as an organisation we have their back, they will be believed, and the Trust will take action.
We recognise that becoming an anti-racist organisation is an ongoing journey but remain steadfast in our commitment to develop an action plan and seek recognition with the North West BAME Assembly’s anti-racist framework. We will review our progress regularly with the Equality Diversity and Inclusion steering group and strive for meaningful and lasting change, addressing health inequalities through an anti-racism lens, and fostering a culture which celebrates cultural diversity.
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