Abstract

Population and workforce diversity in the National Health Service
(NHS) together with legislation and national guidance has led to
equality becoming an increasingly important issue for patients,
service users and staff. Ambulance services, as public sector
organisations, are bound by the Equality Act 2010 and as NHS
organisations are actively encouraged to implement the Equality
Delivery System (EDS) and its successor EDS2, providing the local
strategic context to understand and address system inequalities. This
chapter examines current challenges for ambulance services in
relation to equality and why this matters. It goes on to explore how
services are responding to diversity, how they should embed this
through engagement with both patients and staff and how they
should understand the effects of these activities through more
effective data monitoring.