Equality Delivery System (EDS)

The Equality Delivery System (EDS) has been designed by the Department of Health to help NHS organisations to meet their duties under the Equality Act (2010). Its purpose is to drive equality performance and to embed equality into mainstream NHS business.

The EDS is essentially an NHS equality benchmarking tool. It will help to ensure that everyone - patients, public and staff - has a voice in how we are performing.

EDS Outcomes and Objectives

At the heart of the EDS is a set of 18 equality outcomes grouped into 4 goals. It is against these outcomes that performance is analysed and graded and action determined.

The four EDS goals are:

  • Better health outcomes for all
  • Improved patient access and experience
  • Empowered, engaged and included staff
  • Inclusive leadership at all levels

Engaging with local interest groups

The EDS requires NHS organisations to engage with local communities and organisations with an interest in health issues to determine performance through a grading exercise.

For more information & to access the key EDS documents please follow the link below:

NHS Equality Delivery System (EDS)

What we are doing in Oxfordshire

NHS Trusts in Oxfordshire are working together to implement the EDS. We held a Have Your Say event in September 2012 to introduce the EDS and to start to identify priorities for action. The event was attended by about 60 people. For more information please see the reports below:

Have your Say Easy Read report

NHS Equality and Diversity Consultation Event 2011 Report

 

EDS grading process

We worked together with the Oxford University Hospitals Trust to convene two panels to look at our evidence and grade us against the EDS goals and outcomes. The first panel looked at Goals 1 & 2 and was chaired by Anita Higham, the vice chair of LINks, and comprised volunteers from LINks and representatives of the various protected groups. The second panel, for Goals 3 & 4, was made up of a mix of staff side representatives and volunteers and was chaired by Patrick Tolani, the Director of Oxfordshire Equality and Human Rights Council (OEHRC).

We did an internal pregrading based on the evidence that we had but the final grading represents the views of the panels.

EDS grading results

The EDS system uses a RAG rating, with purple for ‘excelling’, green for ‘achieving’, amber for ‘developing’ and red, ‘undeveloped’. We were graded mainly ‘developing’ with some areas ‘undeveloped’. Please click here to view our EDS grading results

The EDS grading guidance is very clear that without supporting evidence broken down by most protected characteristics, organisations cannot be graded as ‘achieving’. Where evidence is not broken down by protected characteristic an organisation must be graded as ‘undeveloped’. Because of the lack of systems being in place to collect and analyse some elements of this data it has been acknowledged by the Department of Health that many Trusts will be graded as ‘undeveloped’ or ‘developing’ this year. Systems need to be put in place locally for us to be able to collect and analyse this data to enable us to ensure equality of access and outcomes for these groups and thus be legally compliant.

The results of this grading process and the feedback from our panels have helped inform our interim Equality Objectives. For more information, please visit our Equality Objectives page.

For more information please contact:

Mary Hardwick (Equality & Diversity specialist) mary.hardwick@oxfordshirepct.nhs.uk

Click here to see our Equality Evidence page.