Equality of service delivery
A healthy population is one of our core objectives as an organisation. To ensure we achieve this we have implemented six key aims. The first two of these aims are specifically designed to support equality of service delivery and reduce health inequalities, these are:
- Champion the need for mental health, learning disabilities and autism to be given equal parity to physical health.
- Better understand the diverse needs of our population and use this to plan and deliver care that increases access and positive outcome for everyone in our community.
We continue to ensure any service change adopts a review of health inequalities and actively looks to address this as part of any changes made. We complete Equality Impact Assessments for all pathway changes and have continued to adopt a system approach to health equalities assessments.
Across the Lincolnshire Integrate Care System we started working with our partners to understand what information and support is required for the reduction of health inequalities and we are proud to have been an integral part of this work.
The Trust collects equality monitoring information by protected characteristic areas for the Friends and Family Test and complaints data. This data is published annually in the Trust’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion annual report.
Throughout 2023/24 we have developed our relationships across the system to secure mental health services being embedded in our transformation plans which link to population health management and the development of strategies which seek to reduce health inequalities.
We are proud to state that we collect 100% of age, sex and deprivation status for all the people referred to us. We successfully collect upwards of 90% of ethnicity and acknowledge that we have further to go with bringing this up to 100%.
We consistently report through the Data Quality Maturity Index score which is reported both through our Trust Integrated Performance Report and nationally.
With specific detail to the Statement and Mental Health, the indicators related to Core20PLUS for adults or children and young people are:
• Overall number of serious mental illness physical health checks (at ICB level)
• NHS Talking Therapies recovery
• Rates of total Mental Health Act detentions
• Rates of restrictive interventions
• Children and young people’s mental health access
We regularly review and analyse our Mental Health Act Detentions by the above protected characteristics through our legislative committee. However, we do not currently publish our analysis on health inequalities in a public forum.
We are committed to ensuring equality of service delivery and further work to evaluate and review current approaches is underway.
To promote equality of service delivery in our organisation we have a translation and interpretation service and actively ask service users about their communication needs as part of the Accessible Information standards. Teams have access to both face to face and video translation services to support people at appointments, even when taking place virtually.
The Trust’s Medical Director, as the executive sponsor for Health Inequalities, has been developing a local approach to ensuring services are accessible for all, culturally appropriate and proactively targeted with specific groups where required. Our work on implementing the Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework within the Trust continues and will be further developed throughout 2024/25 by leading through our system to support our partners in ensuring these indicators are not only reported against but understood from ward to board.
