BAME pharmacy professionals well represented in London NHS Trust

Background

NHS England published the Pharmacy Workforce Race Equality Standard (PWRES) report in 2023 detailing information on ethnicity of pharmacy professionals. It was a significant step in creating an evidence base to explore racism, discrimination and inequality in career progression within the NHS pharmacy workforce. It was agreed that the first step should be to understand our department’s position in relation to national indicators.

Objective

To complete a benchmarking exercise of Barts Health pharmacy department against national data and the local population.

Method

The pharmacy staff list was reviewed by senior leads to ensure accuracy prior to identifying each individual’s grade and stated ethnicity. A comparison was made with indicators 1 and 2 of the PWRES report and against local population data. NHS staff survey results were obtained to conduct a comparison between pharmacy, the Trust and national indicators 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the PWRES report.

Results

The percentage of Black, Asian and minority ethnic pharmacists employed at Barts Health was 84%, in comparison to 43% of the national profile. This was demonstrated across all AfC bands. For example, 91% BAME pharmacists at Band 6, compared to 55.8% of the national profile, and 83% BAME pharmacists at Band 8d, compared to 20.6% of the national profile.

The percentage of BAME pharmacy technicians at Barts Health was 77%, compared to 19.2% of the national profile. This was demonstrated across all AfC bands. For example, 83% BAME pharmacy technicians at Band 5, compared to 19% of the national profile, and 33% BAME pharmacy technicians at Band 8a and above, compared to 16.2% of the national profile.

The local population is 53% BAME, compared to 81% BAME pharmacy professionals at Barts Health.

The perception of equity in the workplace was of similar levels within the whole pharmacy department, whole Trust and nationwide for BAME pharmacy professionals (51%, 49%, 46.3% respectively).

12% of all pharmacy staff had experienced discrimination at work, compared to 8.8% of national BAME pharmacy professionals.

Conclusion

BAME pharmacy professionals are well represented across all AfC bands. Pharmacy technician numbers at higher AfC bands are low, and it is therefore difficult to infer any firm conclusions and work needs to be done to increase pharmacy technician representation at senior levels.

Perceptions of equity, experience of harassment and discrimination are similar in the pharmacy department to that of the wider Trust and national indicators. The results demonstrate a downward trend across the Trust on an annual basis.

Limitations: Detailed information from the NHS staff survey was unavailable, therefore the comparison with the staff survey results looked at the entire pharmacy department rather than split by ethnicity. Due to the high proportion of BAME professionals however, the results have been extrapolated and inferred. The results from the staff survey also included those from non-pharmacy professions, whereas the PWRES report included only pharmacy professionals. Our department has a significant number of staff who aren’t pharmacy professionals and further analytical work is being undertaken to explore equity of career progression for these staff groups.

Additional authors: Shammi Khatun & Raliat Onatade, Barts Health NHS Trust

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the UKCPA or its members. We encourage readers to follow links and references to primary research papers and guidance.

Competing interest statement:

The author declares: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.