Equality and inclusion

As a nurse, understanding your ethical and regulatory responsibilities in promoting inclusion and implementing equality of opportunity is vital, not just to ensure that you keep within The Regulatory Code (NMC 2018), but it is critical to your working colleagues and to your patients too.  

The RCN’s corporate equality and inclusion strategy highlights five key areas for action for us all.

1. Challenge and change

This means that we are all responsible for calling attention to poor and discriminatory behaviour in nursing and holding ourselves and others to account.

2. Connect and communicate

As a nurse, you’ll connect and communicate with a diverse range of colleagues, clients and patients. Have you thought about how you do that and whether or not your skills could improve in this area?

3. Equip and inform

Your continuing professional development isn’t simply confined to your clinical skills. Equipping yourself with information about your patients and their cultural practices or personal preferences is important in delivering holistic patient care.

4. Identity and intersectionality

Everybody has an age, an ethnicity or national origin, a sexual orientation and gender identity, which may include identifying as non-binary. How these elements interact to shape our dignity and experiences in the workplace, and as patients, is often dependent in their intersection and interaction over time. Remembering that we are all complex human beings who deserve dignity and respect is fundamental to nursing practice.

5. Inspire and activate

Get involved in your local branch and networks, be inspired by campaigns and movements that seek to promote social justice. Lead the change you want to see.