New Guidance on Equality Duty
The new Equality Duty for public sector bodies comes into force on 6th April. A new Essential Guide to the General and Specific Duties has been published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. It covers the legally required steps for organisations such as NHS trusts, along with additional recommended actions. There is no longer a requirement to publish an equality scheme as such but sufficient information to demonstrate compliance will need to be published by the 31st July 2011.
The Government has published a summary of responses to the consultation on the Equality Duties and the draft Specific Duty can be found on the same page.
Legal Round-Up
The draft Employment Equality (Repeal of Retirement Age Provisions) Regulations, 2011 were laid before parliament on 16th February and will come into force on 6th April. The regulations will phase out the default retirement age of 65 and make it unlawful to dismiss an employee on the grounds of age unless there is objective justification. ACAS have published guidance to the regulations, Working Without the Default Retirement Age.
Proposals to provide new protection from age discrimination in the provision of goods and services went out for a three-month consultation on 3rd March. They are expected to take effect from 6th April. The consultation proposes that there should be no specific exceptions for health and social care. The plans will eliminate harmful discrimination while allowing justifiable and beneficial age-based practices, for example in public health programmes. The Department of Health has given some examples of clinical decisions, such as cervical screening, that will be unaffected in an announcement also made on 3rd March.
On 16th February, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills announced that the right to request time off for training is now not going to be extended to all employees until April 2011. On the same date, the Government Equalities Office announced it had ruled out implementing the dual discrimination provisions in the Equality Act in April and describes the provisions as under consideration.
Work Pressures Increasing As Cuts Bite
Last year, 70% of employers made compulsory redundancies and as cuts now hit the public sector, three surveys have indicated that employee engagement is poor across all sectors.
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's (CIPD's) Employee Outlook Survey found that one-third of public sector workers believe they are likely to lose their jobs as a result of the recession. Seven in ten public sector workers believe that finding a new job would be difficult and nearly half report experiencing excessive pressure in their jobs at least once a week.
The State of Human Resources Survey by King's College London demonstrated that nearly 50% of NHS organisations have increased working hours. It also found that 84% of respondents from all sectors denied there was any issue with gender pay differentials within their organisation, despite the national gender pay gap and only 33% claiming to be doing anything to measure gender pay.
The survey reported that one-third of organisations saw a rise in employee grievances this year, poor relationships between staff and managers and bullying/harassment were identified as the main causes. Bullying was also found to be a significant issue in The January Employment Index which found that 25% of respondents (from the website Monster.co.uk) have experienced workplace bullying, and 40% have suffered from severe stress due to work pressures.
The CIPD have urged organisations to find cost-effective ways of equipping their line-managers with the skills to support employee engagement and wellbeing and to consult and involve staff during major reorganisations.
Improving Healthcare For Older LBG Patients
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) have published a paper on improving health and social care for older LBG users. Don't Look Back? examines the evidence bases and concludes that they have been overlooked in health and social care legislation, policy, research, guidance and practice, all of which assume service users are heterosexual. The evidence, though insufficient, suggests that older LGB people face many of the same issues as heterosexual people when aging but that their experiences and needs are also influenced by disadvantage and discrimination.
The paper recommends improving the evidence base (including monitoring), strengthening advocacy, engaging with older LBG service users as experts by experience and using their care and support as a litmus test to indicate the effectiveness of agencies. It also welcomes the inclusion of sexual orientation in the new Equality Duty and draws attention to the particularly sparse evidence available concerning bisexual service users.
Another publication from the EHRC, Improving Sexual Orientation Monitoring, explores anonymity and confidentiality, how monitoring might be made more effective, and how to collect and use monitoring information.
Junior Staff Have Higher Rates of Sick Leave
Junior NHS staff, and those on lower pay are more likely to take sick leave according to a report published by the Audit Commission on 10th February.
Managing sickness absence in the NHS reports that healthcare assistants have the highest average rate of absence, followed by ambulance staff, and then nurses, midwives and health visitors. Those working in areas of high deprivation are also significantly more likely to have higher absence rates.
The Audit Commission found that sickness rates vary from 2% to higher than 6% and estimates that savings of at least £290 million could be made across all NHS organisations working to reduce absences. Presenteeism, where staff do turn up for work but function at less than full capacity because of ill-health, is thought to be even more costly for trusts and a particular problem in the higher pay grades.
Some subscribers noticed that we didn't produce a February issue of this e-news. Apologies. In future there won't be an issue in January because there is a lot less to report post-Christmas, that way February's issue can be timely and we can proceed as usual.
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