At Barnardo's our purpose is clear: changing childhoods and changing lives, so that children, young people, and families are safe, happy, healthy, and hopeful.
By adopting and implementing the Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF), we’re firmly committing to reducing racial inequalities within our mental health services.
What is the Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF)?
Following the 2018 independent review of the Mental Health Act, NHS England has taken a significant step forward in addressing racial inequalities within mental health services by developing and launching the PCREF.
The PCREF empowers organisations like us to improve access and experiences of services and improve outcomes for diverse ethnic, racial, and cultural communities.
This mandatory framework aims to support service providers in their journey to becoming actively anti-racist organisations in three main areas:
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Leadership and governance: trusts’ boards will be leading on establishing and monitoring concrete plans of action to reduce health inequalities
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Data: new data set on improvements in reducing health inequalities will need to be published, as well as details on ethnicity in all existing core data sets.
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Feedback mechanisms: visible and effective ways for patients and carers to feedback will be established, as well as clear processes to act and report on that feedback.
Our commitment to the PCREF
As a charity with diversity and equality at our heart, we’re committed to challenging bias and discrimination. We’re determined to tackle race inequalities and inequities by improving our governance structures, accountability and leadership across our organisation, to include better representation of racialised people and improve services accordingly.
We believe that Barnardo’s must be a charity where everyone can belong. This means offering the right services regardless of disability, religion, gender, sexual orientation, belief, ethnicity, or language.
Our work implementing the PCREF in 2024/25
We have a strong commitment to becoming anti-racist and anti-discriminatory, and the commitment to implementing the PCREF and other mechanisms for advancing mental health equalities supports this.
In 2024, we began work to implement the PCREF, and as part of this, we:
- Reached out and engaged with children and young people
- Scoped out the governance structure for the PCREF, with the Executive Director of Children’s Services-Delivery and the Director of People and Culture, providing dedicated Executive Leadership, to ensure strong oversight and accountability and leadership across the organisation
- Conducted internal analysis and research to enhance our understanding of good practice and to understand barriers to access, experience and outcomes for ethnically and racially diverse communities
- Mapped PCREF against existing transformational programmes to promote alignment and prevent duplication to identify gaps
- Developed a plan which encompasses the three core components of PCREF detailing actions, timeframes and intended outcomes
What we've learned
What we're doing well
From the work carried out so far, Barnardo’s understands where our practice is developing or good and we recognise the requirements to improve the access, experience and outcomes for the children, young people and families from racialised and ethnically and culturally diverse communities who access our mental health offers.
From our initial research and information gathering, it is evident that there are areas of good practice in Barnardo’s. This is demonstrated in areas including:
- Our Anti Racism Commitments, managing racist incident process and through our policies, codes of conduct and training that are developed, delivered and evaluated with experts by experience
- Clear reporting mechanisms internally to the Board of Trustees, ensuring clear governance oversight and accountability
- Our complaints process which has an option relating to race to support understanding of racialised experience. The complaints data is reviewed and discussed at a senior level to enable reflection and ‘lessons learnt’, as well as to support robust planning for improvement
What we need to improve and develop
Benchmarking against the the six national competencies of the PCREF has allowed us to understand that our practice is developing in cultural competency, partnership working, co-production and co-learning, and that it is good in terms of colleague knowledge and awareness and our workforce. The use of the self-assessment tool has also supported our assessment process and has enabled us to see that we are achieving in 12 of the 18 areas for improvement.
Analysing this evidence and working in collaboration with colleagues and children, young people and families has enabled us to identify opportunities within our action plan to strengthen our position and to ensure we improve access, outcomes, and experience for the children, young people, and families from racialised and ethnically and culturally diverse communities.
What's next
The PCREF outlines excellence in practice and provides Barnardo’s with an evidence-based framework for good practice which lays the foundation for the work we are seeking to do as an organisation to develop excellent, inclusive children’s services. Our PCREF action plan clearly outlines what we are committing to do over the next 12 months, and is aligned to the three core PCREF components.
We acknowledge that the implementation of the PCREF is a journey to becoming actively anti-racist by ensuring that Barnardo’s is responsible for addressing racial inequalities and inequity in mental health services and by co-producing concrete actions that are sustainable and dynamic.
Whilst we recognise that we are at the beginning of the PCREF journey, our reporting will demonstrate the outcomes of this journey, and the progress achieved and will actively demonstrate how we are reducing inequalities for racialised and ethnically and culturally diverse communities.
We are open to having continued conversations about race and inequalities and will be continuing to work hard to come up with solutions to address racism and racial inequality.