National Health Service: Workforce Race Equality Standard

Lord Patel of Bradford Excerpts

Wednesday 24th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, I shall give the House a few figures. Some 22% of all staff in the NHS are from BME or minority ethnic backgrounds, 28% of all doctors and 40% of hospital doctors. Yet only 3% of medical directors are from BME backgrounds and 7% are in senior management roles. We have two chief executives and six chairmen from BME backgrounds out of 250 trusts. So the performance across the NHS is, as the noble Baroness has mentioned, absolutely terrible and we have to take some serious action to change it. The noble Baroness has given one example but I think that there are many others. The NHS workforce race equality standard is a new initiative which, by introducing some transparency into the health service, will improve matters.

[Lord Patel of Bradford (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord because I know that, as chair of the WRES committee, he is very committed to this issue. But does he agree that the targets set will be incredibly difficult to meet in the space of a couple of years? It will mean making changes to tackle the huge inequality that has existed in the NHS for a number of years. I suggest that one way of achieving this is to ask CQC inspectors, when they carry out their inspections, to target specifically the WRES and look for action plans that show improvement year on year. If the improvement is not there, no trust should be getting a “good” on the CQC’s well-led domain without addressing this specific issue.

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, the whole purpose of the WRES is to shine a light on the performance of each trust in the country. The CQC will be including it in its well-led domain from March of this year and has already begun to incorporate it into its inspection processes. As the noble Lord knows, in Bradford where he is the chairman of a trust, we have a huge amount of progress to make.