Equality Impact Assessments

mhs homes conducts Equality Impact Assessments on all its strategies, policies, projects and procedures. 

The main purpose of an Equality Impact Assessment is to improve the work of public organisations by making sure that the services delivered are of excellent quality and relevant and accessible to all service users. This can only be achieved by ensuring that organisations do not discriminate in the way services are provided and that, where possible, they do all they can to promote equality and good relations between different groups.

In the main, written policies or service delivery arrangements never intend to discriminate but certain equality groups can be disadvantaged, discriminated and/or excluded if mhs homes fails to take account of the needs of different people and communities. 'Equality' is not about treating everybody the same; it is about recognising that everyone is different – with differing needs. The impact assessment process ensures that the needs of different equality groups are taken into consideration when planning a new policy service or function, or making a change to an existing one.

An equality impact assessment is a process for making sure individuals and teams think about the likely impact of their work on customers and service users. Impact assessments challenge the assumption that policies and services affect everyone in the same way, by detecting and assessing any adverse impact on a particular group so that action can be taken to improve policies, strategies, services or functions where appropriate.

What is an equality impact assessment?

An equality impact assessment is a thorough and systematic analysis of a policy - whether that policy is written or unwritten, formal or informal, and irrespective of the scope of that policy, to estimate the likely equality implications either of implementing a new policy or initiative or of the operation of a current policy, function or services.

Equality impact assessments are intended to:

increase participation and inclusion

change the culture of public decision-making

place a more proactive approach to the promotion of equality at the heart of public policy.

Action Planning

The whole point of carrying out equality impact assessments is to identify better ways of delivering services so that all communities can benefit from them as they need to.

When we have made our assessment of what needs to be changed, or what could be improved, the next step is to identify the action that needs to be taken.

In order to ensure that agreed actions are taken forward, we are required to produce an action plan as part of our assessment, and the actions from this plan need to be incorporated into the service planning process so that they can be tracked and mainstreamed.

Publication of results of the impact assessment

Finally, results of the impact assessment will be published and monitored. We do this because it is important to publish the results of the impact assessment so that there is a public record of the process undertaken as well as to inform the consultees in the process of how their views informed the final decision.