Our Black Country and West Birmingham ICS has a People Board which is responsible for improving the health and wellbeing of our health and care workforce and is committed to making the BCWB the best place to work.
Our People Board has established a Black Lives Matter Working Group in recognition of the social, economic and employment inequalities faced by people from a Black and Asian background in line with the overall objectives in the NHS People Plan. The work of this group is focused on a number of projects designed to stamp out inequality and racism in order to improve the working lives of colleagues from a Black and Asian Background working in Health and Social Care in the region.
The Black Country has a rich cultural heritage and its communities from a Black and Asian background make up 26% of the local population. Research informs us that Britain is becoming increasingly ethnically diverse with over 14% of the population being from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups (BAME). Ethnic minorities account for 80% of the UK population growth with forecasts showing that by 2050 the ethnic population could rise to a third (20-30%) of the UK’s population.
We know that to provide high quality health and care services to our diverse communities we need to attract recruit and retain more people from diverse backgrounds as we want our workforce to be representative of the communities we serve. We want to become an employer of choice now and in the future. Our Black Lives Matter campaign has been developed to showcase the diversity of colleagues who already work in the region and the aim of this campaign is to highlight what’s great about working in the Black Country and to reiterate that Black Lives Matter in the Black Country and West Birmingham.
