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

[oviraptor21]

More sunlight:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/9f61bd6a-cc1b-11ed-b678-b1f2f968726b?shareToken=e9c2296c14ad21bb109e76c74bc666a2

Praying that he also orders them to start writing in plain English again.

But if I recall, he's been saying that for ages. Question is, why isn't it done already?

I guess this is part of the process. He's written to them and asked for a response by May 1st. If they are happy to comply then job done. If not then he has to consider next steps.

Finally. Really shouldn't have to be pleased about this but hey, every step in the right direction.

They've got to follow through AND the next government (who will probably be Labour) have to hold the line

Now FGS get politics out of the police. Their bias and incompetence at two separate events this week have been thoroughly documented. You cannot have a policitised police force acting as a lobby group's private security. Not and still expect people to pay taxes.

Abolishing NHS Annexe B can't come quick enough.

Steve Barclay should focus on negotiations to avoid more strikes, workforce planning, rescuing primary care, and doung something about the fact that autism services in the southwest have basically shut their doors and forced you to go private or never get a diagnosis unless your life has collapsed.

After all that, he can talk about this.

But he won't, will he? Because he is delighted that the NHS is imploding.

Perhaps he, like many of us, has the ability to focus on more than one thing at once.

I'm sure he has. I'd like to see some evidence of him doing it though.

This stuff came in under the Tories. How did that happen? The NHS is not independent of government.

Hmm about time.

They need to start moving before any more damage is done and preferably before another woman patient is informed that she cannot have been raped- because there were no penises on her ward that time…

Has anybody told the NHS that?

"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...?

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

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

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.

I agree.
But maybe they should be evidencing thr VFM they're getting in relating to all the aspects of diversity and inclusion. I expect there is a fairly narrow focus currently.

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.

sorry that was meant to be a reply to slothtoes.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.