Anti-racism - Turning commitment into action

At Berkshire Healthcare we're not just talking about racism - we're taking action to become an anti-racist organisation.

Published 7 May 2024

We’ve listened to our Board, our colleagues and our communities. Here’s some of what we’ve learned:

Our communities told us…

“We want support to be culturally tailored”

“There are sometimes language barriers and assumptions are made”

“There needs to be a clear process for reporting incidents”

Our colleagues told us…

“There needs to be more progression and developmental opportunities for staff from ethnic minority backgrounds”

“When racist incidents happen, we need to be transparent and learn from mistakes”

“Focus on education and training”

“Help us understand what to do when we witness racism”

From these conversations, five key areas of focus have emerged. Guided by our anti-racism taskforce and led by our Executive Directors, here's what we're doing:

Recruitment, Retention, Progression, and Conditions:

We’re taking action to address the underrepresentation of Asian, Black and mixed colleagues in senior roles (Band 8b and above). This includes making sure our job descriptions are fair and unbiased and guaranteeing interviews people from diverse ethnic backgrounds who meet the essential criteria.

We’re also working on increasing the ethnic diversity of our Allied Health Professionals and we’re creating talent pools based on skills so we can help our colleagues progress without needing to interview again.

Policy and Practice:

We want our colleagues to feel confident on how to make improvements that will address racism in a meaningful way, so we’re creating some guidance and providing some training on health disparities and anti-racism data so they can use the information effectively.

We know that our policies can lead to inequitable outcomes, so we’re also providing our policy and scrutiny groups with anti-racism training and revising our approach to Equality Impact Assessments.

Education and engagement

To increase awareness and understanding of what it means to be anti-racist, in addition to anti-racism training for all our colleagues, we’ll embed anti-racism into existing training and learning activities.

We’re also exploring additional training for our leaders and managers, while regularly discussing anti-racism to keep it at the forefront of everyone’s awareness.

Incidents, support and empowerment

Ethnically diverse colleagues are more likely to experience harassment bullying or abuse, so we’re taking action to address this. This includes reviewing our Safety Culture Charter to be clearer about racism, and make it straight forward for people to report racism

We’re also training our colleagues on handling racial conflicts and improving access to support for colleagues who experience racism.

Patient access, experience and outcomes

We know that there are inequities in access, experience and health outcomes so we’re taking action to address wait times and improve our response rate to patient experience feedback for racialised communities.

We’re also exploring further ways to tackle significant inequalities experienced by our Gypsy, Traveller, Roma, Showmen and Boater communities, and we’ll continue to work with our CommUNITY forum on our multi-faith education and engagement project.

Tell us more

We welcome your input and encourage you to contact us to tell us about your experiences, any barriers to accessing our services, or concerns and ideas. Please contact Karla.Inniss@berkshire.nhs.uk

Join our CommUNITY forum

If you are a community group, local service provider, patient, carer or someone with lived experience, we’d welcome you as a member of our CommUNITY anti-racism forum.