Establishing a Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework in the East Midlands
The Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF) is a race equity and accountability framework that helps organisations understand what steps they can take to achieve practical improvements.
The East Midlands Alliance for Mental Health, Learning Disabilities and Autism has used a joint approach to sharing learning, tackling new programmes and common challenges together on a range of issues over the last four years. The learning from work in other areas has been applied to the Alliance approach to PCREF development.
The Alliance works to a draft set of strategic objectives that include Reducing Inequalities, Improving Population Health and Enabling Safe Care.
One of the key joint programmes to deliver these strategic objectives has been to take a collective approach to the development of provider PCREF programmes.
CEO focus on PCREF
The East Midlands Alliance Chief Executive group meets fortnightly to share common challenges, successes and to progress joint programmes of work. To feed into the development of the PCREF framework and to better understand the tools available to support providers in tackling issues, the CEO group met with the national PCREF leads Jacqui Dyer and Husnara Malik.
As a result, the CEO group agreed to establish a PCREF forum for the East Midlands Alliance with representatives from the six large providers of mental health services.
Membership of the Alliance PCREF group
The East Midlands Alliance PCREF forum has representatives from all six providers including some Medical Directors, Deputy Nurse Directors and PCREF leads.
The group has also benefited enormously from consistent input from Husnara Malik and Jacqui Dyer, the national PCREF leads.
Initial focus of the Alliance PCREF group
The PCREF group meets on a quarterly basis and has focused on:
- understanding the common challenge
- providing feedback on the draft PCREF document
- building an understanding of the tools available to understand the provider specific challenges and to guide the choice of initial actions
- sharing learning on leadership, resourcing, governance and work plan development.
The East Midlands group has also heard from PCREF leads from two of the PCREF pilot sites.
Early learnings from the collective approach
Most of the providers are near the start of the PCREF journey and are establishing programmes, identifying leadership and resourcing. A couple of the providers are further advanced and have shared their experience and learning alongside the pilot PCREF sites. It has been of great value to hear the experiences of others and to test ideas collectively. It has also been valuable to have clear support for this work as a priority from the CEO forum.
The input from national leads has been very valuable. Some of the most helpful messages have been that most providers nationally are near or at the start of their PCREF journey, that the PCREF document itself can help structure a PCREF programme and that the important thing is to establish a PCREF programme and start to take actions which can then be reviewed, rather than be frozen by the scale of the challenge.
Feeding into wider forums
The East Midlands Alliance CEO group are all members of the Midlands and East CEO network which had prioritised joint anti-racist work. This has developed into a priority focus on the PCREF. The East Midlands Alliance CEOs have taken part in PCREF leadership workshops run by the Midlands and East CEO forum and will take part in a larger shared learning event in November.
Next steps
The East Midlands Alliance PCREF group will meet again in the autumn and will consider any specific joint projects and the regular reporting into the Alliance Board.