NHS contractor Bromley Healthcare is hosting a three-day diversity conference for more than 1,000 healthcare workers that will feature discussions on pronouns and gender. The Telegraph has more.
Despite record backlogs, the NHS main contractor for community healthcare in South East London, Bromley Healthcare, is hosting the conference entitled ‘Be the change’ from October third to the fifth.
The conference will include lectures on “pronouns, language and LGBTQ+ allyship” and “gender and LGBTQ+ sessions for colleagues working with children”.
Emails seen by the Telegraph also show healthcare staff were told to complete “mandatory unconscious bias training”.
Miriam Cates, the Conservative MP, said: “This kind of ‘training’ is not only a complete waste of taxpayers’ money, it is also deeply divisive, spreading destructive ideas that the majority of the population reject.
“‘Unconscious bias’ training has been shown to be a worthless exercise and we should be deeply concerned that the NHS is encouraging its staff to talk to children in their care about sex and sexuality.
“The Government should introduce a ban on all public sector training that does not directly relate to the activities for which staff are employed.”
Dame Priti Patel said: “The alarming rate at which woke ideology is powering through the ranks of the public sector and civil service is shocking.
“Now we hear of mandatory lectures for health professionals whose focus should be on patient care and not pronouns.
“The professionalism and impartiality of the machinery of the state is rightly under serious public scrutiny so it’s about time the leadership at the top of Government took responsibility and stopped the spread of such activities across the public sector.”
More than seven million people were waiting for treatment in England at the end of July. Since then, all 1,300 staff employed by the contractor have received seven separate emails from the CEO of Bromley Healthcare, Jacqueline Scott, urging attendance of the conference, which is held annually.
A source told the Telegraph that the invitation was sent to teams that were so short-staffed they were in “near crisis mode” and at risk of ceasing operations.
Bromley Healthcare was found to require improvement in five out of six key areas of competence after its latest inspection by the independent regulator of the NHS in summer 2021.
The Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) report rated the contractor’s safety standards, effectiveness, responsiveness and leadership as requiring improvement. Only its care provision received a rating of “good”.
According to the CQC, “requires improvement” means that “the service isn’t performing as well as it should and we have told the service how it must improve”.
Issues highlighted included a failure to make “basic criminal record checks” on non-executive directors, a “variation in [the] quality” of care provided by nursing and health visiting teams, and it found “patient experience feedback was limited”.
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