The diversity of our network: Summary of findings of the Healthwatch People Diversity Survey
Our recent exploration of shared values highlighted equity as a core principle of Healthwatch. The trust of our communities, essential for people sharing their experiences of health and care with us, depends on our ability to mirror the diversity of those we serve, thus nurturing a sense of inclusion.
Our work and decision-making thrive on diverse perspectives. Over the past few years, we have embarked on a journey to embrace equality, diversity, equity and inclusion (EDEI) in our work. Key steps on this journey are set out below.
One of our commitments has been to understand the diversity among our staff, volunteers, and board members across our network and to assess whether our actions are driving positive change.
Thanks to everyone for completing the Healthwatch People Diversity Survey, which gives us a fuller picture of the network's diversity and indicates an emerging commitment to diversity - one element of our shared value of equity as a network.
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Steps on our EDEI journey so far include:
2019 Healthwatch England committed to quarterly reporting on our actions to address EDEI across our work.
2020 Joy Beishon, seconded from Healthwatch Greenwich, led work on equity, diversity and inclusion across the network. This included holding conversations with Healthwatch, identifying positive examples of Healthwatch activity across protected characteristics and groups facing inequalities and the introduction of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Peer Network, which continues to meet.
2021 We launched a pilot to collect board diversity information, but we received a low response rate.
2022 The first national survey of Healthwatch diversity was conducted, but a low response rate hindered analysis. The board development organisation Getting on Board provided support to Healthwatch boards on recruitment and diversity.
2024 The second national diversity survey was conducted on Healthwatch staff, boards and volunteers.