Health Equity Action Plan

Health inequalities are avoidable, unfair and systemic differences in health between different groups of people. These can often be linked to people’s socio-economic status, where they live, their background, lived experience or communities that they belong to.

We have developed an action plan to make sure that nobody who needs to access our services is negatively impacted for any of these reasons.

Our action plan is broken down into four key areas of focus:

Leadership and Accountability

This focuses on making sure that underrepresented groups have a voice in the development of our services and that those in leadership positions are held to account to ensure that this input is central in everything we do.

We hope to do this by:

• Ensuring service user voice is present at LMWS Board level.
• Developing coproduction to ensure that it is central in decision making.
• Supporting the creation and facilitation of peer support networks for staff.
• Reviewing mandatory training for all roles within LMWS.
• Monitoring our recruitment and auditing our recruitment processes.
• Ensuring service user involvement, and diverse representation, within all recruitment.

Workforce

We are focusing on who works for Leeds Mental Wellbeing Service, and whether this is a fair reflection of the Leeds community, at all levels throughout the service. Where we find gaps, we’ll investigate why this might be, and how we can correct this. We know that it is essential for the people of Leeds to see themselves in the services they need to access.

We hope to do this by:

• Providing regular, accurate snapshots of our workforce data across the whole of LMWS.
• Developing specific recruitment targets for under-represented communities.
• Investigating volunteering, apprenticeship and work experience opportunities across the service.
• Identifying Health Inequalities champions across the workforce.
• Working with local education providers to promote our services, both as a means of support, and as a potential future employer.
• Ensuring a consistent induction and training process for all staff across LMWS.
• Increasing peer mentoring opportunities across the service.

Service Delivery

We know that for various reasons some of our communities may struggle to access our services more than others. We want to work with these communities to make sure we improve their access to our services, and their overall experience with us.

We hope to do this by;

• Reviewing and enhancing our communications with service users, ensuring that we take into account, and adapt where possible, to their language and communication needs.
• Reviewing any feedback or complaints received by the service, to gain an understanding of where we can make systemic changes to ensure that our services are suitable for all communities.
• Ensuring that opportunities to feed into the development of our services are accessible, and well promoted, for all service users.
• Investigating how we can develop, or adapt, culturally responsive interventions to improve the outcomes and recovery rates of service users.
• Supporting community based initiatives that aim to improve referrals, engagement and recovery rates for some of our most underrepresented communities (initially; men, Chinese communities, Black communities, Eastern European communities, Pakistani communities, those aged 55 and over).

Population Health

This action plan is only the beginning. We will keep studying population data to make sure that we identify further gaps that might affect certain communities from accessing our services, or from receiving the best quality of care available to them.

We hope to do this by:

• Building datasets across the service that clearly demonstrate the protected characteristics of our service users, and utilising this data to identify gaps in access, uptake and recovery rates.
• Analysing the data that we have with regards to patients who don’t engage with our services to understand whether any patterns emerge.
• Building relationships with local underrepresented communities both through facilitating and supporting community based events, and through expanding our social media reach.
• Continuously reviewing this data to understand future priority groups to focus our inclusion work on.

By tackling health inequalities we can help to ensure everyone has the same opportunities to lead a healthy life.

If you would like to hear more about how you can contribute towards ensuring that Leeds Mental Wellbeing Service is accessible for all of the communities of Leeds, please consider joining our coproduction network.

For more information, please contact lmwscoproduction@touchstonesupport.org.uk.