What is EDS?

The Equality Delivery System (EDS) was commissioned by the national Equality and Diversity Council in 2010 and launched in July 2011. It is a system that helps current and emerging NHS organisations to review and rate their equality performance with staff patients and public.

The overall aim is to improve the services the NHS provides to their local communities and to provide safe and secure environments for patients and staff, free from discrimination, while meeting the requirements of the Equality Act 2010.  Under the Equality Act, there are nine protected characteristics – age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.  EDS helps clarify what the NHS, among other organisations, must legally do to ensure that people with protected characteristics such as race or a learning disability are not disadvantaged. 

Interpreting Services

In keeping with EDS guidance, the Interpreting Service was selected as the service to be reviewed and assessed, having first established a strong local need to do so.  We used EDS outcomes to develop an engagement plan, to enable us, in collaboration with communities, to assess and grade the service.  

We have attempted to embrace a mix of progress and good practice, on the one hand, and challenges, problems and concerns, on the other.   Participants were asked to grade performance based on their personal experiences, and in many cases, also provided a rich vein of intelligence for service improvement.

The engagement that took place from January to March 2020 yielded a rich vein of feedback from a broad spectrum of service users and carers.  This work was paused between March-August as the CCG was dealing with the pandemic.  Information continued to be gathered from community members during this time and interpretation was highlighted by many communities as a concern. 

By the end of this year, our plan is to use the engagement feedback that has specifically focused on Interpreting Service to help shape and tender a new Interpreting Service Contract.