We need to ask you about yourself so we can ensure that we deliver the services fairly and to meet your needs. This is called monitoring. What you tell us about yourself helps us to identify any disadvantage you may have and plan services to meet your needs.
Although you put your personal details on forms, it is only sections on race, sexual orientation etc. that are used for monitoring and they don’t identify you. There are strict laws (Data Protection Act 1998) to make sure that we protect the information we collect and deal with it responsibly.
Equality monitoring also helps us to meet our statutory duties under the Equality Act 2010 by helping us eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation, promote equality of opportunity and foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not.
We give this information to the people providing our services so they can make changes to improve those services.
When you give information about protected characteristics, rest assured that it will only be used to make things better. When we use the data we won’t know it’s you!
Here’s an example – the numbers of people who do not attend their appointments is sometimes higher in areas where English is not the first language. Sending appointment letters in their own language to people in those areas is helping.