North East Ambulance Service achieves 'gold standard' on equality

The Trust, which employs over 3,000 people, has maintained its ‘gold status’ from 2021 and is one of only 13 organisations nationally to achieve this status in the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion assessment for 2022.

The assessment grades the progress the organisation has made across nine areas of the business, acknowledging the Trust’s efforts to engage more diverse employees and patients as well as making improvements to services and employment practices.

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Helen Ray, Chief Executive at North East Ambulance Service, said: “Our workforce and communities are becoming more diverse and in response we must change and adapt as an organisation to ensure we embrace these changes and realise the benefits this brings.

“We work hard to ensure that we treat colleagues and patients with care, compassion and empathy and we ensure people can access our services, information and employment opportunities in a way that is accessible to their needs.

“It’s important for us to measure our progress each year and benchmark ourselves against others to help us identify areas for improvement and deliver the changes we need to continue to grow and develop.

“We recognise that we still have work to do and we will continue to deliver improvements to our organisation culture to make NEAS and the north east the best place to live, work and grow.”

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Over the last year the service has;

•            Provided opportunities for staff to improve their knowledge and understanding through living library events featuring people with lived experience,

•            Worked with our four employee networks coving LGBTQ+, Disability, Ethnicity and women's groups to make improvements,

•            Introduced a range of accessible information and resources on the website tailored to people with a variety of communication needs. https://www.neas.nhs.uk/patient-info.aspx,

•            Worked in partnership with a range of agencies to deliver key messages around LGBT+ History month, Disability History month and Black history month such as our commitment to be an anti-racist organisation with Show Racism the Red card,

•            Recruited over 100 community ambassadors through our positive action project to help us to reach out into diverse communities and educate people about the services and employment opportunities,

•            Developed tools to help paramedics to communicate and triage people with communication needs, and

•            Introduced and promoted a range of options to ensure people with communication needs can access the services: language line, BSL relay, text relay.

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