What is the impact of your impact assessments?

Impact assessments are meant to be a way we look at the expected or actual impact. But do they?

Lets recap. At present UK public authorities have a duty to assess the expected impact of policies, plans, strategies and functions on race, disability and gender and publish their findings. New legislation is expected to extend this duty to cover all equality strands.

So it involves anticipating the consequences of strategies, policies, functions and services on the groups and individuals and making sure that any negative impact is eliminated or minimized. 

But are we really doing the thorough analysis need to make this determination? Do the impact assessments consider how multiple forms of discrimination can influence likelihood of impacts on certain subsections of a community? 

One of the question often asked is whether there the full information and analysis of users and staff of the service available?  And often the answer has to be no. The bottom line is that unless we have an understanding of users, the communities and their needs that we can never know about the impact of our services. The bedrock then to understanding the impact of any policy is to understand service users.

Unfortunately there is not a lot of help with this task and many service end up speculating what service users might need. I think you must have guessed the remedy. The answer is better engagement with a broad spectrum of service users. Servicse have to improve their engagement with individuals and get feedback from service users. This is more than consultation this is ACTIVE DIALOG of type that rarely happens.

The good news is that this understanding is gold dust. A little bit of knowledge can create a wonderful new horizon where services can focus on Equality Goals. That is they know some of the things that are a prioirty for their users and can focus on them.

This just leaves those needs - the persistent ones- which are not to be found by asking users. These are targets found in the indicies of multiple deprivation, in the pages of the office for national statistics or monitoring statistics.

It is a shame that these statistics are often missing in many impact assessment action plans. However sometimes they do. A dental services manager in the South East found that the local Asian community had a poor oral health record. An officer from that service contacted me and we put together a programme called "Smile with the Prophet", using the local Mosque in awareness raising. This is programme devised in Bradford. The outcome was wonderful we had 120 young people in the trail and other queing to be involved.

Now that is an impact!