Building confidence and skills
Building confidence and skills in our workforce to reduce inequalities
We want to make reducing inequalities part of everything we do as a workforce. We have created this workstream to encourage everyone across the whole system to work towards this common purpose. We want to support individuals and organisations to know how their work is helping to address inequalities.
The purpose of this workstream is to support staff to understand their role in reducing inequalities and to increase leadership capacity within the alliance of partners.
Understanding your role in reducing inequalities
Everybody can play an important role in tackling inequalities, and we want to ensure our workforce has a greater understanding of how they can do this.
We are doing this by:
Embedding the ‘3 As framework’ across our place
The Kings Fund ‘Awareness, Action and Advocacy’ framework (from “My role in Tackling Inequalities”) is a simple and useful framework to help us find our own role in reducing inequalities.
We have held workshops with staff to focus on how to use this framework as part of the Alliance launch and as part of Race Equality Week. Think about how you can play a role in tackling inequalities by downloading our reflective thinking exercise.
Sharing our stories
There are lots of great examples of how people working across our place have taken action to reduce inequalities. This includes changing the way services are promoted to reach the people who need them, to working with local Imams to understand how to make services more culturally appropriate.
Below you can watch Nadia’s story, which is an example of working happening across our district to reduce inequalities.
We want to gather and share more stories to help other people working in our district know where they can start on their reducing inequalities journey. If you have an example you want to share with us, please email ria@bradford.nhs.uk
Training to increase your knowledge, confidence and skills
eLearning for healthcare
eLearning for healthcare have a range of modules relating to inequalities. Most modules are a combination of topic summaries, links to guidance and questions to test knowledge, and take up to 30 minutes to complete.
Modules include:
- All Our Health programme helps health and care professionals make an even greater impact in preventing illness, protecting health, promoting wellbeing and reducing health inequalities. It consists of 33 bite-sized sessions covering a range of public health topics including obesity, inclusion health, financial wellbeing and health disparities.
- Health Literacy module is designed for people working in health and social care to increase awareness of health literacy and of the techniques that can help to increase understanding
- Health Inequalities programme is designed to provide healthcare professionals with a better understanding of the differences in the care that people could receive and the opportunities that they have to lead healthy lives – both of which can contribute to their health status and outcomes. It has six modules covering each of the Core20Plus5 clinical areas and sickle cell disorder.
Foundation Programme in Public Health
The Foundation Programme in Public Health is an entry level course which has been designed for people working in NHS trusts, GP practices, Voluntary Community and Social Enterprises (VCSE), the Police service and schools. It consists of two levels, each consisting of four sessions of three hours each, and is delivered online.
Modules include an introduction to public health and tackling inequalities and the wider determinants of health.
Increasing leadership capacity to reduce inequalities
In Bradford District and Craven we are committed to embedding reducing inequalities into everything we do. One of the ways we can achieve this is to support our existing and future leaders to better understand inequalities and the importance of taking action to tackle them.
We are in the process of developing this workstream, but our intention is to work on the following themes:
Supporting community partnership leadership teams
Our local community partnership teams are focussing on how they can reduce inequalities. To support them in this work, we have developed a specific reducing inequalities toolkit. The toolkit provides a lightweight but systematic framework for planning, designing and assessing action to reduce inequalities.
Developing key messages and specific training support
We have identified a number of opportunities where we can increase awareness of reducing inequalities – these include:
- Creating key messages for inclusion in partner organisations’ induction programmes (via the People Plan),
- Developing local support for participants in the West Yorkshire Improving Population Health Fellows
- Working with the University of Bradford to explore curriculum and placement development
- Aligning activity with the Strategic Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead
We are working with key system partners to further scope these opportunities, ensuring that we are enhancing existing work and programmes.