Equality of service delivery

The Trust continues 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 are also looking to adopt a system approach to health equalities assessments.

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 which can be found on the Trust website www.lpft.nhs.uk.

To promote equality of service delivery in our organisation the Trust has a translation and interpretation service and actively asks patients 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 is committed to ensuring equality of service delivery and further work to evaluate and review current approaches is underway.

The Trust’s Medical Director has been appointed as the executive sponsor for Health Inequalities and is launching our local approach to ensuring services are accessible for all, culturally appropriate and proactively targeted with specific groups where required. As part of this work, we will be implementing the patient and carer Race Equality Framework at the Trust in 2023/24.

The Trust will be working closely with the Lincolnshire Integrated Care System, including with public health colleagues and local communities, to look at specific interventions that may be required. In particular the system will tackle specific inequalities for people with serious mental illness, people with a learning disability and/or autistic people, such as lower life expectancy, higher levels of smoking, alcohol use, obesity, and increased risk for other physical health problems.