Case study: Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust

Introduction

Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust (Pennine Care) has sought to address its disciplinary gap by increasing the capacity of the senior HR team to enable greater scrutiny and oversight, coupled with anti-racism training and education.

Pennine Care provides mental health, learning disability, and autism services to a population of 1.3 million people in parts of Greater Manchester and Derbyshire. The trust has a workforce of approximately 4,000 staff, of which 17.9% are from an ethnic minority background.

Data collected by the trust as part of the annual NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) submission for 2022/23 showed a decrease against metric three (with ethnic minority staff 1.1 times more likely, where 1 is equally as likely, to be taken through the formal disciplinary process). This was an improvement on the previous year, where ethnic minority staff were three times more likely to enter a formal disciplinary process than their white colleagues.

The NHS Providers Race Equality programme and Hempsons team spoke to Nicky Littler, director of workforce, and Shawnna Gleeson, deputy director of workforce, at Pennine Care to hear more about the organisation’s work on this topic. This case study shares details of the interventions they have implemented, their impact, the challenges faced, and advice they would give to other board members.

Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust's four top tips for other board members

• Be brave and face the issue. Create safe spaces to have the conversations, challenge each other in an appropriate way and do not let fear of saying the wrong thing prevent you from talking about the issues and taking action.
• Have a strong evidence base - use the data.
• Take a person-centred approach and embed this insight across all your work.
• Be ready to discuss challenging issues and get to the core of what the concern is.