Let's celebrate our fantastic women

Women all over the world are celebrating International Women's Day today.

I was surprised to hear that the day has been going for over 100 years. It originally started in Soviet Russia after women gained suffrage in 1917 and March 8th became a national holiday there. It has since spread to the rest of the world, and certainly seems to have ramped up its profile over the last few years. #ThePowerOfSocialMedia.

This year's campaign theme is ‘Balance for Better’ which promotes gender balance and asks how can we help forge a more gender-balanced world; one in which we celebrate women's achievements, raise awareness against bias and take action for equality.

My husband is very ‘right on’ so I was a bit taken aback when he asked whether we actually need a women’s day. It made me ponder, but only momentarily before I gave him short shrift and a curt reply which included the words ‘Yes!’ and ‘still a long way to go’.

But his point was not about whether we should be promoting gender equality, as a trade union representative he has been passionate about equality for all his working life. It was rather about the value of a dedicated day when this is such an important agenda it should be part of our mainstream business and we should be supporting all areas of equality.

Of course he is right, equality, diversity and inclusion should be one of the bedrock principles that underpin how we develop and deliver our services and as such, be in our hearts and minds always.

However, campaigns such as international women's day and others, such as LGBT month which has just finished, are massively important ways of raising the profile of these issues and celebrating what has been achieved and the progress being made, but also highlighting what more is needed.

Whilst today is a great way to focus on gender balance, we should be focused on equality and balance in its broadest sense.

If you think about our organisation, women make up over 70% of our workforce and 10 out of our 15 board members are women, so we’re doing OK in terms of girl power. We still have a bit of a gender pay gap so there’s work still to do, but we need to take a wider approach to equality and our Board is keen to support balance in all areas.

We know that the experience of some of our minority groups is not as good as it should be, and our latest staff survey results for example show that we still need to make improvements around discrimination and fairness of career progression.

We want our organisation to be a place where difference and diversity is welcomed and valued for the richness of experience, strengths and views this brings. We want our workforce to reflect the diversity of the local communities we serve so that we can bring a real understanding and appreciation of their lives to our work. And we want to create an environment which is fair, inclusive and non-discriminatory so that everyone's contribution counts.

We’re doing a big piece of work about diversity as this needs a much bigger profile within the organisation. Earlier this year, we held a board session specifically about equality, diversity and inclusion where we talked about the issues, what we currently have in place and what more we need to do.

Yvonne Coghill, national director for the NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard, is coming to do a follow-up session with our board which is brilliant. Yvonne’s a former mental health nurse and has also helped the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in the United States develop their inclusion strategy, so she brings a wealth of expertise.

We’re also re-launching our equality and diversity group, and the plan is to launch our new equality, diversity and inclusion strategy later this year, and then work on embedding good practice across all our teams.

You’ll know already that I’m very interested in how we create a positive culture in the organisation, where we live and breathe our values, and this is a fundamental element of it.

There is a tendency to see cultural change as 'soft and fluffy' because of the large people element.

But an essential part of cultural change is ensuring that the systems and processes we use are aligned to our values and our expected behaviour. For example, it's no good saying we are an organisation that is fair, when some of our processes such as recruitment are seen as biased and unfair. So we do need to focus on improving our key systems and processes.

This links in with the Just Culture national initiative which we are also launching today, which is focussed on one of our most important processes - dealing with, and learning from, patient safety incidents.

I’m at our first Just Culture event today, and we’ll share more about this next week as we’re one of the first NHS trusts in the country taking this forward. But in a nutshell, the Just Culture approach recognises that any error or problem is seldom the fault of an individual, but the fault of the system.

The single greatest impediment to error prevention and learning is that we punish people for making mistakes. The Just Culture framework supports a consistent, constructive and fair evaluation of actions when people are involved in patient safety incidents.

So, here’s to International Women’s Day. Let’s celebrate the achievements of women everywhere; but here’s also to our wider equality, diversity, and inclusion approach which we will strengthen over the coming months.

Best wishes
Claire Molloy