So the DDAQ is drawn from the official guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission straddling across the statutory code for employment, for provision of services and the technical guidance on further and higher education. So hopefully it’s a good reflection upon what the law requires and how we should be practising. So it covers the six areas of discrimination of a disability kind...
So the DDAQ is drawn from the official guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission straddling across the statutory code for employment, for provision of services and the technical guidance on further and higher education. So hopefully it’s a good reflection upon what the law requires and how we should be practising. So it covers the six areas of discrimination of a disability kind. So there are questions about the definition of disability within the Equality Act and then questions about direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, discrimination arising from disability, failure to provide reasonable work adjustments or any other kind of adjustments, disability-related harassment and victimization. And it really is concerning that it just bears out what, unfortunately, I anticipated, that the reason there’s so much discrimination going on is that people are not aware of what their responsibilities are. So the positive thing, apart from it confirming that people don’t know, so for example, the level of awareness was equivalent to about 60%. Only 11% of experienced NHS staff achieved the target score. 10 of the 30 items were known by less than half of experienced NHS staff. So this is quite alarming in the sense that we’re at risk of inadvertent discrimination, but also we’re probably not doing everything positive that we could to help people with disabilities to achieve their rights and have a life that is more worth living perhaps than the one that they’re experiencing. The positive side is the evidence is that just by completing this 15 to 20 minute exercise people substantially increase their awareness, so for everyone it goes up by about 34%. If you exclude the people, the few people who knew it anyway, then it goes up by 40%. If you take the people who scored roughly half, then it goes up by about 79%. And for the people who are the lowest scorers, they more than double their awareness as a result of the 15 to 20 minute exercise. So having kind of piloted it, what I’m hoping now is to just be raising awareness because this is a free tool available on the website to anyone working in the NHS or any healthcare-related service.
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