NHSScotland parental leave policy: equality impact assessment

5. Recommendations and conclusion

NHSScotland’s commitment to eliminating unlawful discrimination, harassment, victimisation and less favourable treatment is central to the principles and values that underpin these policies.

NHSScotland workforce policies should be applied fairly and consistently to any employee or worker regardless of:

• protected characteristics (age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership or pregnancy and maternity)
• personal characteristics such as trans identities including non-binary, weight, social status
• offender status
• membership or non-membership of a trade union
• contractual status - part-time or fixed-term

The EQIA process did not identify indirect or direct discrimination through the policy intentions of the NHSScotland Parental Leave Policy.

The NHSScotland Parental Leave Policy supports employees in relation to their parental responsibilities by providing access to statutory entitlement to parental leave and supplemented by a period of paid leave.

It is anticipated that the policy will positively impact on eliminating unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and advance equality of opportunity across all protected characteristics. The policy has no negative impact in promoting good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not. There is no evidence of negative impacts on people with protected characteristics.

The EQIA will be kept under review and updated based on new data, evidence or policy revision. Monitoring and review of this policy is an on-going process, involving iterative discussions with NHSScotland partnership groups. It will form part of the monitoring and review of Board’s achievement of the Staff Governance Standard (2012) carried out through the Staff Governance Monitoring Framework. Further engagement with protected characteristic groups through staff networks and forums will form part of the ongoing review to ensure that the conclusions reached in the EQIA meet the needs of these groups.

Analytics from the website will allow collation of data related to use and accessibility of the policy, in addition to workforce data gathered through national datasets.