Equality, diversity and inclusion

Why?

These changes align with amendments made to the standards of proficiency in our most recent review to strengthen our commitment to EDI. More active wording clarifies our expectations of registrants around issues such as challenging discrimination, empowering service users, and maintaining professional boundaries.    

Specific standards:

Treat service users and carers with respect

• 1.1 You must treat service users and carers as individuals, respecting their privacy and dignity.
• 1.2 You must work in partnership with service users and carers, involving them, where appropriate, in decisions about the care, treatment or other services to be provided.
• 1.3 You must empower and enable service users, where appropriate, to play a part in maintaining their own health and well-being and support them so they can make informed decisions.

Make sure you have consent

• 1.4 You must make sure that you have valid consent, which is voluntary and informed, from service users who have capacity to make the decision or other appropriate authority before you provide care, treatment or other services.

Challenge discrimination

• 1.5 You must treat people fairly and be aware of the potential impact that your personal values, biases and beliefs may have on the care, treatment or other services that you provide to service users and carers and in your interactions with colleagues.
• 1.6 You must take action to ensure that your personal values, biases and beliefs do not lead you to discriminate against service users, carers or colleagues. Your personal values, biases and beliefs must not detrimentally impact the care, treatment or other services that you provide.
• 1.7 You must raise concerns about colleagues if you think that they are treating people unfairly and/or their personal values, biases and beliefs have led them to discriminate against service users, carers and/or colleagues or they have detrimentally impacted the care, treatment or other services that they provide. This should be done following the relevant procedures within your practice and maintain the safety of all involved.

Maintain appropriate boundaries

• 1.8 You must consider the potential impact that the position of power and trust you hold as a health and care professional may have on individuals when in social or personal settings.
• 1.9 You must take action to set and maintain appropriate professional boundaries with service users and/or carers and colleagues.
• 1.10 You must use appropriate methods of communication to provide care and other services related to your practice
• 1.11 You must ensure that existing personal relationships do not impact professional decisions.
• 1.12 You must not abuse your position as a health and care practitioner to pursue personal, sexual, emotional or financial relationships with service users and/or carers, or colleagues.

Expectations of registrants:

• In the updated standards we have strengthened our language around treating service users and carers with respect, requiring registrants to empower and enable (as opposed to encourage and help) service users and support them to make informed decisions.
• Making sure that registrants have consent before they provide care, treatment or other services is a vital part of our standards. Our new standards build on this, providing further information around what constitutes valid consent (i.e. that is in voluntary and informed).
• We have also strengthened our language around discrimination and made it more active by
  • adding an explicit requirement to treat people fairly and be aware of the potential impact that their personal values, biases and beliefs may have on the care, treatment or other services that they provide to service users and carers, and in their interactions with colleagues.
  • actively requiring registrants to take action to ensure that their personal values, biases and beliefs do not lead them to discriminate against service users, carers or colleagues and to raise concerns about colleagues if they think they are discriminating against service users, carers and/or colleagues.
  • Requiring registrants to know and understand the relevant procedures within their practice to raise concerns about discrimination.
• We’ve responded to requests from registrants to provide more clarity around what we expect in terms of their responsibilities maintaining appropriate boundaries. We’ve expanded this section, included more active language and introduced a requirement for registrants to consider the potential impact of their position of power and trust when in social or personal settings.

Resources

To support the consultation period, we hosted six workshops. These workshops explored each key theme of the consultation and provided an opportunity to ask questions about the revisions we have made.

You can watch a recording of all of the workshops including the equality, diversity and inclusion workshop.