This Friday 3 December, is International Day for People with Disabilities. To show our support and to mark the event, our EDI Team and our Disability Staff Network are delivering an inspiring and informative session for NELFT staff. The event will explore the experiences of people living with disability and to celebrate their contributions in society. The aim is to help create a shift in the way we think about disability and to build allyship between people who are disabled and people who are not disabled. Active allyship is at the heart of disability equality, particularly in the workplace.

Simon Hart, our Executive Director of People Culture and Susan Smyth, Director of Nursing and Chair of our Disability Staff Network, will lead the event and will be joined by some incredible guest speakers who are living with disabilities. They will share their experiences, their achievements and their activism towards disability equality and help us to better understand the world as someone who is differently abled.  

We will be joined by:

Carl Morris 

Carl is an inspirational speaker, world champion in pool and has trekked all over the world as an adventurer, culminating in being the first deaf person to trek the last degree to the North Pole on foot.

Liam O'Dell

Liam is a midly deaf, freelance journalist and campaigner specialisin in deafness, disability and social media. His talk will have an intersectional approach that explores the challenges of having both hearing loss and autism.

Asha Hylton

Asha is a deaf Paediatric Critical Care Sister with severe and profound hearing loss, who works as Nurse in Charge at King's PICU. She will provide an intersectional lens on disability as a Black woman and address the topic of disability inclusion post- COVID.

NELFT - A Disability Confident Employer 

In NELFT, our Disabilty Staff Our DSN have published a strategy for 2020-2025 which has some key objectives that they will be taking forward. The DSN at NELFT wants to Engage, Enlighten, Empower, Enable and Encourage. 

Their main aims are to:

• Promote a better understanding of our equality objectives and what NELFT is seeking to achieve, including becoming a Disability Confident Leader and improving the Trust’s Workforce Disability Equality Standard scores

• We want to know what staff and other key stakeholders think about our quality objectives, and so we encourage feedback wherever possible to ensure we are always working in the best interests of the people we represent

• We want to make sure that staff are kept informed of our progress, and that we provide them with updates on key developments and initiatives we are working on

• We are working to promote greater transparency and greater accountability with regards to disability inclusion across NELFT

We are extremely supportive of equality and are award winners in this field. Equality and diversity is a high priority for us, we are proud of our staff and want them to be proud of us.

We pride ourselves in our ongoing commitment to being a Disability Confident Employer. We wish to reiterate that declaring a disability at the point of application, or at any point in a recruitment or selection process, will not count against any individual, nor prevent them from being shortlisted, subject to meeting the minimum criteria of the person specification.

In this video from our NELFT talks series, our CEO Prof. Oliver Shanley OBE and Jacqui Van Rossum, Executive Director for Integrated Care in London, are in conversation wtih Marie-Antoinette Ferreira-Pursley, Co-Chair of our Disability Staff Network and co-chair for Dyslexia and Specific Learning Difficulties Network. They talk through the disability support available for NELFT staff and our ambitions to make sure that NELFT is a fully disability inclusive employer.