Steve Barclay, health secretary, orders NHS bodies to rethink Stonewall ties and scrap diversity officers

The Daily Mail has more details of this-https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11902765/amp/Health-Secretary-calls-NHS-quangos-ban-diversity-officers-review-memberships-Stonewall.html

As I said before Steve Barclay is just posturing, this is just politicking: you can tell by this quote: ‘A Whitehall source said: 'These NHS bodies should be spending money on patient care and frontline services rather than diversity and backroom bureaucracy.'

So not ONE single one of the bodies mentioned as written to provides patient care or frontline services. Not one of them. That would be… the actual NHS. And the NHS which DOES do these things, is not funded by any one of these NHS bodies. Never has been.

The ones on the list are all back office- they are inspectors of the NHS care or research or it’s treatment standards or private medical care etc. Like the CQC, NICE, the UK Heath Security Agency, NHS Blood and Transplant, the NHS Counter Fraud Authority, the Human Tissue Authority. The whole fucking essential purpose of these organisations is ‘backroom bureaucracy’ . They are there to make sure the front of house actual health providers do their work properly, safely etc.

Are the Tories seriously saying that we shouldn’t have those checks and balances? because that would be terrible for patient care.

So at very best, what Barclay is doing sending this letter is all for show and completely irrelevant to the work these organisations do. Does Barclay even know what they actually do? This kind of crap makes me feel desperate that these stupid Tory men are in charge of anything to do with the NHS..

He needs to act quickly.

The NHS are discussing Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month on Facebook

"Symptoms of ovarian cancer can be caused by lots of things, which can make it hard to diagnose. It’s important to be checked by a GP if things don’t feel normal for you, or if any symptoms continue or get worse."

For more information, visit ➡️ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ovarian-cancer/

They don't mention which sex has ovaries in the post at all.

Women do eventually get a mention on the website, but look at the difference between prostrate cancer causes and ovarian. Where is the gender waffle on the mens post?

it might be different experiences. I’ve seen the positive things I described happening in practice, but I’m sure there are plenty of things people get wrong. And the colleagues I know who wear rainbow lanyards choose to do that and are positive about it, but there may well be some who do it despite feeling they would rather not.

admirable in principle

And all those things are admirable in practice, but they are not how EDI pans out in practice. Look at how instrumental it has been in undermining women's rights within the NHS - EDI was the Trojan horse that let in Stonewall. EDI enforces rainbow lanyards and gaslights women on 'single-sex' wards about men in the next bed. EDI replaces 'mother' with 'birthing parent' and makes female staff afraid to object.

I’m not an EDI professional though, so that might be a simplistic description. That’s just some of what I have seen.

In-house EDI training isn’t about winning legal changes. It’s about actually making those legal wins real on the ground… whether that’s making sure your senior staff don’t keep appointing people who look and talk exactly like them, getting departments to consider accessibility issues, showing how flexible working can actually benefit teams, or identifying where particular groups are being given all the least interesting work or denied development opportunities.

1.4 million are directly employed by the NHS. That excludes everyone who works in primary care.

And I do not believe that your DD has never done any of this training. Aside from the question of who on Earth keeps their mother updated on their mandatory training schedule, it is compulsory to have training in these topics, and I am sure she will have had them at induction and since. If she does not remember them, that rather makes my point.

People always think that 'training' is the answer. It isn't. Training is not useful or retained unless used.

uncovering and addressing things like lack of women in senior roles, sexist hiring practices and the gender pay gap.

I def WOULD cheer them on if they were achieving any noticeable gains in respect of these issues. But I don’t see VFM from EDI teams there either.

Its 1.4m and my DD has been there for 2 years and never done any diversity or culture training, she is front line.

Don't know where you get your numbers from & as i pointed out, the Govt themselves have a whole directorship on Diversity.

Show me some evidence that having EDI staff or EDI training improves these issues. All the big advances in legal rights were made before any of these things existed. Since the advent of EDI as A Thing, women's rights have gone rapidly into reverse.

EDI just produces group think - it is the enemy of true diversity of opinion, which is what any organisation needs to thrive.

Personally I’d be happy to see MORE money spent on diversity and inclusion budgets for these NHS bodies if they would include eg anti-sexist training and data measuring and anti-homophobic training and data measuring. Plus pro-safeguarding training as part of ensuring actual diversity and inclusion.

Jesus, no. Diversity & Inclusion and training are total grifts already. The last thing we need is to combine them into a meta-grift.

Two million people work for the NHS. They already average at least 10 hours per year of 'culture' mandatory training - D&I, conflict resolution etc - so that's 200 million person hours lost from patient care.

Yes, the aims of having greater diversity and inclusion are good ones - but they aren't the outcomes that are actually delivered.

It's rather like sex ed in schools.

It was a great idea.

It got hijacked by extremist political groups who want to use it for their own agenda to do harm to the very people the initiative was for in the first place.

People lose all willingness and enthusiasm to embrace the idea any longer, particularly as they're being told 'well if you moan about the harm you'll lose the whole thing'.

When people aren't waiting years on waiting lists yada yada, this kind of extra might look a more palatable cost to tax payers.

Allowing dedicated work on EDI to be scrapped seems like a strange way of improving the situation. The government is seizing on this as an excuse to remove EDI in general as a priority. That’s not something to celebrate.

So the NHS shouldn't have a management structure that supports their very wide and diverse workforce inc & esp women and the range of patients they treat?

Doesn't really strike me as a way to aid retention and recruitment.

Yes of course to the stonewall stuff but plenty of modern private companies have diversity directors and teams including none other than.......

https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/the-diverse-leadership-taskforce#:~:text=Janette%20Durbin%20%2D%20Director%2C%20Civil%20Service,Inclusion%20Adviser%20to%20the%20Cabinet

Measuring the "lack of women in senior roles, sexist hiring practices and the gender pay gap" will be impossible if recording biological sex is abandoned in favour of genderism.

I think the problem is partly that very few people have been called to intensive courses on any other EDI themes but LGBT+ (which turned out to be in fact TQ+) to the point that they've become somewhat pissed off.

And partly that there's little point in trying to celebrate wins for women like sexist hiring practices when you're busy at the same time embracing the extreme misogyny and homophobia (particularly towards lesbians) of the political TQ+ movement. The one makes the other look incoherent to put it mildly.

sorry that was meant to be a reply to slothtoes.

They do include all these things, as well as working to improve race equality standards and disability equality standards. It’s very disappointing to see people cheering on this government’s demonisation of jobs with a direct responsibility for uncovering and addressing things like lack of women in senior roles, sexist hiring practices and the gender pay gap.

OK this is just posturing. These are public bodies of wildly different roles on that list. Some have a closeness to the NHS and others not.
Some are huge. The tiny ones won’t have diversity officers or budgets to be members of anything external. The bigger bodies that might have such budgets or roles can just decide in response to this letter, that yes they do get VFM from paying to be in Stonewall or whatever. So this letter is either irrelevant to recipient, or it’s relevant but easy to ignore if they want to.
In any case, what are the government really trying to achieve here? Membership of sexist, homophobic Stonewall is a symptom, not the cause.

Personally I’d be happy to see MORE money spent on diversity and inclusion budgets for these NHS bodies if they would include eg anti-sexist training and data measuring and anti-homophobic training and data measuring. Plus pro-safeguarding training as part of ensuring actual diversity and inclusion. D&I is a very good thing for public bodies to aim for.

Every time I am reminded of that event my blood runs cold.

And yet it seems to behave as though it is on this issue.

"I would ask that you, as a member of the wider health family, now review whether your organisation is getting value for money from your diversity and inclusion memberships and, if not, consider any steps that you could take to address that, such as following the department’s example and allowing any association/subscriptions that you have to lapse or be cancelled.”

What if these captured organisations all think they are getting value for money...?

Has anybody told the NHS that?