Today marks one year since the murder of George Floyd.

His death led to worldwide protests over systemic racism and policing. We know his death impacted on many of our staff and our service users.

Now is a time to pause and reaffirm our anti-racism commitment.

We want to be champions of equality, diversity and inclusion. It is fundamentally important that we stand together and do all we can tackle racism.

We know we still have work to do to support our staff and people who use our services and a make real changes here at Team SHSC. We have made progress over the last year to tackle issues related to race.

Here are some of things we are proud to have achieved so far:

• We are supporting, listening to and working with our BAME Staff Network Group.
• We do not tolerate abuse towards or by, our service users or staff. We have taken lots of actions to improve our processes and policies.
• We are improving support for staff and people who use our services who experience racism and we are testing this out on Stanage Ward. We are also working with the police on how we report racism to them and improving our systems for monitoring hate incidents. We are testing this out on Maple Ward.
• We have a positive and focused plan to increase the number BAME people in senior roles.
• We have workforce plans to make sure our staff reflect and represents our communities and we let people who may apply for roles know this is important.
• We have recently actively rebalanced our board make up by recruiting a local, BAME clinician to a non-executive director post. We will be able to tell you more about this soon.
• We have a reciprocal mentoring programme involving the Board, directors and BAME staff.
• We are working with Sheffield Flourish, Sheffield and District African Caribbean Community Association and ADIRA to understand the experience of our communities to create change. We have put on a series of live steamed learning events together.
• We have made changes in our Improving Access to Psychological Therapies offer so that it is more accessible and effective for people from BAME communities.
• We work in partnership with other NHS organisations and Sheffield City Council as part of the Sheffield Accountable Care Partnership. This partnership has a new Racial Equity and Inclusion Group (REIG). Abiola Allinson, our Chief Pharmacist, will be co-chairing this with Shahida Siddique, Director of Faith Star which is a social enterprise in Sheffield.
• We actively monitor and take action to address disproportionate numbers of BAME staff in formal procedures, including changes to our disciplinary procedure.
• We are collecting and reviewing more information about service use and areas. We want to understand the difficulties experienced by some people accessing our services and why some BAME groups are over represented in the use of restrictive practices. The more we understand, the quicker we can improve things for the communities we serve.

We are going to continue to work closely with staff (in particular our BAME Staff Network Group), service users and partners to make changes that benefit everyone.