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            Diversity Works: Sample Outline of a Managing Diversity workshop

           1-day workshops for NHS Trusts

           We are customarily asked to focus on these topics: 

§         Anti-discrimination laws – introduction for busy managers: what the laws mean in terms of day-to-day practice, including Public Sector Duties and Risk / Impact assessing

§         Flexible Working – the equality dimension

§         Sickness absence policies – keeping within equality law

§         Recruitment Interviewing and Selection – especially in terms of cultural diversity

§         Performance Review / Appraisal – the equality dimension, especially race and gender

§         Front-line Cross-cultural Communication skills for Service Delivery to diverse communities – ensuring equality of access    

§         Cross-cultural Communication skills for successfully managing a diverse workforce – especially, eg, to resolve internal team tensions, achieve better group motivation and problem-solving

§         Preventing / dealing with harassment – gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion

            1 or 2-day workshop on Managing Diversity in NHS – sample outline

This model outline was used with Boards, managers and clinical team leaders of a consortium of 6 Trusts across West London (and again with 6 Trusts in Avon; and for Trusts in West Midlands and Sussex). It covers overlaps between disability, gender, sexual orientation, age, part-time and flexible working, but the West London Diversity Group in this case wanted race and culture as the main focus, developing managers’ diversity competence in terms of attitudes, knowledge, legal understanding and compliance, risk/impact assessing, monitoring,  community consultation processes, intercultural communication skills, team leadership and action planning.

A full data report is available on request, showing all 225 managers and team leaders’ written responses to this workshop, plus later evidence from HR Directors and Managers detailing what practical activity resulted from it.

DAY ONE

  1. Introduction: Why awareness and skills for responsiveness to Diversity are now legally essential
  2. Names: handling diversity of naming systems; what is best practice when names are unfamiliar, difficult to pronounce
  3. ‘Target Groups’: small group exercise on participants’ own experience of diversity and/or social undervaluing of differences
  4. Questionnaire: to establish the level of existing knowledge of relevant laws, Trust policies, local demographics
  5. Establishing common understanding and Working Definitions of key concepts/terms of the law and of Trust policies
  6. Anti-discrimination law: practical understanding for busy managers - not just what a law says, but what facts of work practice can found a case. [Using DVD evidence from a real NHS Tribunal case.]
  7. Recruitment and Appraisal: how unintentional forms of unlawful discrimination result from ways the procedures are conducted, and how tribunals regard these 
  8. Managing Cultural Differences not as ‘problem’ but as enrichment. UK’s historical legacy and the damaging effects of stereotypical thinking. Handling attitudes to differences of language, religion, family traditions, health beliefs, etc.
  9. Review of Research: differential physical or mental health patterns among minority ethnic groups, plus (for MH Trusts) the commonest forms of cross-cultural misdiagnosis and treatment of mental health

DAY TWO

  1. Community groups and refugee support organisations: making consultative links, and conditions for winning confidence for help in identifying underutilisation of services and monitoring outcomes.
  2. Cross-cultural communication for managers: the vital skills for recruitment, appraisal and performance measuring, handling grievances, disciplinaries, or harassment, in a culturally diverse workforce. Also communication competencies for resolving any intercultural team tensions and drawing positively on diversity in team-working and conduct of meetings.
  3. Cross-cultural communication for clinical and front-line administrative staff: the crucial skills for avoiding misunderstandings with patients (and their relatives) when only partial English is spoken; or when English is fluent, but patients come from different cultural backgrounds. Ways to use interpreters; how to use English with those for whom it is not their first language.
  4. (Optional) Institutional Constraints for NHS Trusts on implementing DoH policies of Equality in practice. Common hidden assumptions that rationalise inaction, marginalising, or tokenist responses towards anti-discriminatory practice.
  5. Conditions for success: identifying in advance the potential barriers to change, as a key step in turning diversity policy objectives into whole-staff mainstream practice.
  6. Action planning, short and longer-term, with 34 - point checklist for informal on-going team development.  
  7. Evaluation with full report, including ‘felt-needs’ diagnosis and staff consultation issues for senior management to address.

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