Discrimination against gay and trans staff is undermining productivity, claims CEO

Mark Cubbon, CEO of Manchester University Foundation Trust and chair of the NHS Confederation’s LGBTQ+ leaders network, told HSJ there is an “awful lot more” to do to ensure the health service is more inclusive.

A new survey by the network found that members had experienced higher rates of direct or indirect discrimination compared to the workforce as whole, while only 14 per cent felt their organisation acted swiftly and appropriately to these incidents.

A quarter of respondents said they had experienced homophobia while 20 per cent reported encountering transphobia. This was significantly higher than recorded in the last survey in 2021.

Network chair Mr Cubbon said: “[Some people] ask the question about, ‘why are all these things important’, with the breadth of the agenda that we’re facing across the NHS.

“As I’ve said, not only is it morally the right thing to do, there’s an imperative here for us all.

“If you think of the amount of money that it costs the NHS, where we could optimise productivity, because we haven’t got some people able to feel as though they’re working at their best, they feel that they’re working at their optimal state, or through some of the impact around bullying and harassment, we’re talking about billions of pounds of opportunity cost of getting this right [in terms of bullying and harassment across all aspects of EDI].

“It’s really important for the individuals, morally the right thing to do, and it’s really important for the taxpayer so that we can get people to come to work. We employ more than a million people across the NHS, and we want people to be at their best when they come to work.”

Responding specifically to the survey results, Mr Cubbon told HSJ: “I think that what it’s showing us is that we still have an awful lot more to do, and it says that the pace at which we’re able to make the improvements is just not where it needs to be.

“Were [the results] surprising? Sadly not, in some areas.

“But we have got to really get behind now some of the messages that followed out of the survey and be committed to drive further improvements based on the feedback that we have.”

Not called out or challenged

More than 540 members of the LGBTQ+ network were surveyed. About 39 per cent believed their organisation had implemented meaningful inclusion work while 37 per cent did not.

Qualitative feedback from one respondent said inclusion is “palpably cared about” in their organisation and “the message is clear that bigotry will not be tolerated”.

However, one also said: “I regularly witness and experience microaggressions that seem normalised within the organisation. This has often been from senior managers. Their behaviour is not called out or challenged in any way.”

Another added: “Sometimes it’s difficult to know, for example, if a refusal to attend the organisation’s trans training is a genuine case of not being available or is a not wanting to.”

The findings were compared with previous results in 2021 on the Gartner Inclusion Index, which attempts to measure how inclusive organisations’ environments are.

Fair treatment fared best, followed by psychological safety and belonging, while the perception of diversity scored the worst.

UPDATE, 16:16: This article has been updated to further clarify a quote from Mark Cubbon