Equal Treatment was completed over 2022. The project worked with 3 partners and aimed to challenge racism and health inequalities through strengthening self-advocacy and peer support.
The project helped groups think about how to be more inclusive and good allies to tackle racism.
We know some people are treated differently because of racism or prejudice.
We know people with a learning disability from ethnic minority communities don’t get equal access to health care.
The project was to help more people know about their rights to help them get equal treatment.
Learning Disability England worked in partnership with Race Equality Foundation on this project.
It was funded by NHS England.
There were 3 strands of work in the project.
A coproduction group helped choose the partners for the work.
Strand 1: Strengthening inclusive self-advocacy
Changing Our Lives worked with 10 self-advocacy groups to deliver training to help them understand and challenge racism.
They supported self-advocates and senior leadership teams to think about how to be anti-racist and plan for how they could be more inclusive in their work in future.
Strand 2: Strengthening family led or parent peer support
Contact led a similar piece of work with 13 family carer groups.
Their training was created through conversations with each group to understand their needs.
It helped them to develop a practical understanding of representation and inclusion, intersectionality, how to identify information gaps and action planning.
Strand 3: Strengthening local community responses on tackling health inequalities and unfair treatment
Include Me Too worked with community groups led by people from minority ethnic communities.
They worked with groups who don’t work with people with learning disabilities all the time to include them more in their work.
We wanted to help connect community groups led by ethnic minority communities with groups led by self-advocates and families.
Include Me Too held a series of online workshops and seminars to bring people together and create space for people to have conversations about shared inequalities.
Shared Learning
Some of the key learning from the project included:
- Most organisations involved in the training hadn’t talked about anti-racism before
- People and organisations wanted to talk about and learn about how to challenge racism
- Most groups don’t collect data about the ethnicity of the people they work with or their local community.
- Support staff often don’t feel confident enough to support people who experience racism.
Resources:
We held a learning session where all three of strand of the project shared their learning.
You can watch it here:
Presentations from all three speakers sharing their learning are here
You can view a number of anti-racism resources created by Changing Our Lives here
You can view Contact’s Diversity and Inclusion Toolkit here and an easier read version here
If you would like to find out more about the project you can email: rachael.hall@LDEngland.org.uk