Good Practice Recommendations - Health
- Health services as a whole need more specific consultation and involvement work with LGB people to root out homophobia in service provision.
- The health service needs to use contracting processes, such as the GP contract to raise the level of expectation around equality for LGB patients and disabled people using services.
- LGB and disability equality issues need to be included in all mandatory training programmes for staff. This is a large task, because of the size of the health service.
- Ongoing learning around equality issues should be carried out in staff teams, with reference to the specific experiences of people using the service and staff.
- There is still the need to tackle the assumptions of professionals that mental distress is the result of a client’s sexual orientation. Such assumptions are currently evident amongst both mental health professionals and consultants dealing with physical health issues.
- Staff in different health areas need to work on the particular barriers that disabled people face in accessing their service, these should include personal assistance requirements and staff attitudes. Attitudinal training should be based on the Social Model of Disability.
- Some primary care services still need improvements in terms of basic physical access for disabled people.
- Choice of health services should be improved, for example access to complementary therapies.
- Barriers need to be removed to increase the number of disabled people working in the health service. This is a massive task.
- Health services needs to monitor sexual orientation of staff alongside other equality issues, to see if there may be any discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual orientation.
- The health service needs to monitor staff self-definition in relation to impairment type, to see if there may be levels of discrimination against people with particular impairments.
