What kind of information do we collect?

NHS Lothian needs to know as much as possible about the diversity of patients, carers, family members, staff and the wider community to make sure that it can develop its services and policies effectively. The information we collect about diversity includes:

• Information about diversity in the wider community across Lothian. If we know about the needs people have, we can shape our services to meet them. For example, we needed to know how many Deaf people lived in Lothian before we could set up a Community Mental Health Service for them.
• Information about the diversity of people who use our services. This information is very important as it tells us whether or not our services are meeting the needs of everyone who should be using them.
• Information about diversity in our workforce. This helps us understand the needs of our staff, so that we can be as effective an employer as possible and make sure that we can give our staff the support that they need. For example, we are setting up staff support networks because we know from staff surveys that some disabled employees are not confident about disclosing their impairment at work.

We get our data from a range of sources:

• Census data, although this is now very out of date (the next census will be in 2011).
• Data from the Equality & Human Rights Commission.
• Information from partner organisations: we share anonymous information about our communities with local Councils, the police and other organisations to get a clearer picture of diversity in Lothian.
• We carry out studies of particular groups of people to get a clearer idea of their health needs. For example, we have carried out studies of the needs of South Asian people with diabetes across Lothian.
• We monitor the diversity of people who use our services. We do not currently do this uniformly, so this will form one of the actions in this Scheme (see Outcome 3.5 in the action plan).
• We monitor the amount of interpreting and communications support we provide, for example the number of hours of Polish interpreting for Polish patients and their families. We use the City of Edinburgh Council’s Interpreting & Translation Service to arrange our interpreting and communications support. This shows that demand for interpreting and communications support is increasing at about 60% year on year:
• We use monitoring information from primary care, such as that collected by GPs. This is also not consistent and we will continue to work with GPs to improve the way they gather information about diversity among their patients (see Outcome 3.5).
• We carry out a staff survey every two years, in which we ask employees to record diversity information, as well as information about bullying and harassment, satisfaction and other issues in the workplace. This information is anonymous. Return rates are under 30% and work is planned to improve the return rate next time (in 2010). See Outcome 6.1.
• We ask all applicants to NHS Lothian jobs about their diversity. We also monitor people who are promoted internally and who undergo training. This means that we have a gradually increasing amount of information on NHS Lothian staff as more and more people change or start jobs with us. From March 2008 to March 2009, for example, the number of disabled employees increased from 126 to 154. This is an increase of 22% in one year. However this still only represents 0.5% of the total NHS Lothian workforce of nearly 30,000.
• We monitor the diversity of people who are not successful at obtaining employment with NHS Lothian [awaiting figures].
• The work placement and Healthcare Academy programmes that we run monitor the diversity of people who pass through them. This is included in the action plan (see Outcome 6.2).
• We plan to monitor the results of impact assessments by including the actions from these in Quality Improvement Programmes. These programmes cover every service in NHS Lothian and are a useful way to collect information about how changes are happening in a particular service or department. This is included in the action plan for this Equality & Human Rights Scheme (see Outcome 3.6).

Actions to improve information gathering and the provision of information in more accessible ways are included in the action plan (e.g. Outcomes 3.2 and 3.5). The plan lists a number of NHS Lothian strategies that show how the information we gather about diversity will be used. Please get in touch with an equality contact for more information about any of these.