Race

The Scottish Government's Equality Evidence Finder cites a figure of 4.6% as being the proportion of the population who identify as Black Minority Ethnic people [BME] as at 2018.

In 2021, Equality Here, Now checked the performance of the NHS in Scotland as employers in delivering employment equality for BME people. The conclusion of that research was :

What emerges from this sampling of employee data by ethnicity, gathered and published by Boards is :

· A common tendency to use the Census data for the population served by Boards as a benchmark against which to check the current profile of BME employees. No rationale is offered as to why this represents a robust benchmark and no attempt is made to reconcile the inevitable disturbances introduced to this model when employees are recruited from outwith the geographic area served by Boards.

· The absence of a robust benchmark against which to check the current number of BME people employed by Boards inevitably leads to the absence of detailed plans for closing the gap between the two figures.

· At no time do any of the Boards conclude that any shortfall in the number of BME people employed compared to the benchmark adopted might be a result of racism in the employment culture, systems or practices of the Board.

· While most Boards have managed to gather and publish basic headcount data in terms of ethnicity of the workforce, the data is often unnecessarily detailed and the presentation of the content of the data tables lacks a creative approach which would make the core data much more accessible and informative.

· NHS Boards publish data sets on ethnicity with varying approaches in how many, if any, previous years are used to provide context to the current year being reported. The EHRC approach of using a 4-year trend is commended.

· NHS Board reports seem unable to cross-reference analysis and learning from past data gathering on workforce ethnicity, using this for the setting of measurable/quantifiable change within a defined timeframe, and then in subsequent reports identifying the actual outturns. EHRC workforce reports offer examples of this good practice.

· No NHS Boards are gathering, publishing and learning from data on nationality of employees and cross-referencing it to data gathered on ethnicity of employees as part of the work needed to eliminate racism in the workplace.

· None of the NHS Boards have put in place any system of checks and balances and data/information gathering in the earliest phase of the recruitment process, leaving a critical area of the process unchecked and absent from the scrutiny and accountability which publishing data and information provides.

Alongside this, the table on page 16 of this research report, which aggregates data published by all NHS Boards into a Scotland-wide workforce profile, shows that the proportion of the NHS workforce which declines to reveal their ethnicity remains stubbornly high at over 27%.

Taken together with the absence of regular detailed scrutiny of the performance of NHS Boards as employers in meeting the general and specific equality duties, either from government itself or from such as Audit Scotland or the Equality and Human Rights Commission, it is almost inevitable that 11 years on from the Equality Act 2010, the NHS in Scotland is unable, after 5 cycles of producing biennial reports on employment data, to provide clear evidence of the elimination of discrimination and the delivery of employment equality for BME people working in the NHS.

Equality Here, Now has researched the performance of the NHS in Scotland as an employer of BME people over a number of years, and the journey from then until now in terms of race equality at work can be uncovered in the research reports published in 2019, 2017, 2015, and 2013.