Barts Health Equality and Human Rights Impact Assessment Report

www.brap.org.uk4. Conclusions and recommendationsHopefully, it will be apparent from the above equality analysis and baseline review that thereare a wide range of equality and human rights issues relating to the proposed merger. In thisfinal concluding section, we suggest a number of ‘high-level’ strategic themes and potentialpriorities for the merged Trust as it develops its own approach to progressing equality andhuman rights.Historically, equality approaches have generated large, unwieldy action plans, the results ofwhich are commonly known: people spending more time going through the documentationthan they do taking action! The new equality duty requires organisations to produce a smallnumber of SMART targets. Devising these will be extremely useful in helping the Trust thinkthrough priority areas which can really support its core business objectives going forward.Our view would be for the Trust to prioritise some of the following actions to help themdevelop equality and human rights strategy that is right for the new organisation:4.1 Act on what you knowThere is a significant amount of available information that could inform the merged Trust’sfuture strategy on equality and human rights in a number of different places. This report isonly part of that equation. We would point to the ‘Equality Impact Assessment: CompletedInitial Screening Form of the Outline Business Case’ (August 2011) and the ‘Equality ImpactAssessment, Initial Screen, Outline Business Case Summary and Recommendations Paper’(September 2011) as particularly useful documents. Both contain insightful information onhealth inequalities as they affect particular groups and also robust recommendations thatshould be considered in developing any future equality and human rights strategy. Inaddition, each separate Trust has its own annual Equality Report and is in the process ofdeveloping associated equality objectives (as is NHS East London and the City). All this isnot to mention the wide range and types of health inequality data collected and analysed indifferent parts of the catchment area identified in section IV.3.This is a lot of information for the merged Trust to consider. The sheer weight of dataavailable is, in part, a product of the size of an organisation and catchment area of this type.It would be all too easy for the Trust to become consumed by reviewing all of this data andconducting more work to gather further information before key decisions are made.However, a key challenge for the Trust – and one it will need to respond to quickly – is usingwhat information is already available to develop clear aspirations and success measuresaround equality and human rights. Despite important gaps, a significant amount of data isalready available: the Trust will need to move fast to avoid getting ‘bogged down’ attemptingto close gaps it cannot currently avoid.210