Promoting equality for ethnic minority NHS staff—what works?

For decades research has shown that discrimination, harassment, and exclusion are pervasive experiences for staff from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds in the National Health Service.1 2 3 4 5 6 In recognition of limited progress in achieving the goals of the now decade old NHS Race Equality Action Plan,7 the NHS has agreed a mandatory workforce race equality standard. The standard requires NHS organisations to collect baseline information from April 2015 on nine indicators of workforce equality for ethnic minority staff, including representation on boards, and to publish annual updates on these metrics (box). Organisations that fail to make progress on these metrics will be in breach of the NHS standard contract, and this will affect whether regulators judge them to be “well led.”8 9 We review the international evidence on the effectiveness of diversity initiatives to assess how best to achieve the standard’s intended outcomes.