Equality and Diversity

Most of us need to visit a doctor or dentist from time to time, and may need hospital treatment on occasion. Others may rely on the NHS and social care services for help with long-term health conditions or disabilities. Whenever you need healthcare, medical treatment or social care, you have the right to be treated fairly and not to be discriminated against.

To make sure we meet this commitment we take our responsibilities to equality and diversity seriously. We consider what our local communities need and how their needs can be best met by the services we commission. We are determined to reduce health inequalities and know we can do this only by understanding the health needs of the local community and making the services we commission inclusive and accessible.

Equality is not for other people it is for everyone, we need to respond by designing services that are accessible, making sure that services are open when they are needed, that people understand the information they are given and they understand what to do if things don't go well.

We have legal responsibilities for equality but our commitment goes deeper, we will demonstrate this through our delivery of the NHS Equality Delivery System, where communities will help us determine how well we are doing and what should we do differently or better in the future.

NHS Wakefield District has worked well to respond to different communities in the past and are proud of some of their achievements.