Health Inequalities
What are health inequalities?
Health inequalities are avoidable, unfair differences in health between different groups in society. That covers everything from whether and how people can access health services, how healthy they are likely to be throughout their life, and their experiences of receiving healthcare.
Why do we need to tackle health inequalities?
Everyone should enjoy equal access to our services, have a positive experience of being cared for by us, and have good outcomes from treatment and support, no matter what their background is or what their needs are.
The people we care for – people with serious mental illnesses, learning disabilities, autism, addictions, and other needs – face some of the biggest health inequalities in our society:
- People with severe mental illnesses are often more physically unwell than people without a mental illness.
- People from some ethnic and faith communities find it harder to access support.
- People with learning disabilities, autism, and other neurodevelopmental conditions often need adjustments to be made so that they can access a service and understand their treatment – but these adjustments aren’t always made.
What are we doing about health inequalities?
Tackling health inequalities is a long-term commitment. There are many areas of our work where we need to take action. But we can’t do all of this at once. To achieve real change for our communities, we need to focus on certain key issues.
The Trust has agreed six priority areas of work:
- Delivering the Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework, an anti-racism initiative for NHS mental health trusts.
- Delivering the Core20Plus5 for children and young people to improve access to mental health services for children and young people living in the most deprived areas from diverse backgrounds.
- Tackling inequalities in physical health outcomes for the CNTW patient population.
- Digital inclusion and accessibility, making sure that both digitally enabled and face to face services are accessible to everyone.
- CNTW as an ‘anchor institution’ that benefits the wider community, for example, through recruitment and workforce development, procurement, use of our estates, and delivery of our Green Plan.
- Equality, diversity and inclusion, continuing our efforts to make CNTW a great place to work for staff from all backgrounds and with different needs.
Interested in finding out more?
We will update this page with information about our work to make our services fairer and more inclusive and opportunities to get involved.