Health Education England: Diversity & Inclusion & Unconscious Bias with Actors

The Story

Health Education England (HEE) offer supervision and support to the Healthcare Sector with a specific focus on medical and dental trainees. The department responsible for North East and North Cumbria approached RightTrack to custom-design a programme for senior medical staff to explore Equality, Diversity and Unconscious Bias in the specific context of their roles at HEE.  

The Programme

In collaboration with HEE, we scripted scenarios that mirror typical situations that Clinical Directors, Consultant Cardiologists and Doctors might face. Professional actors brought these scenarios to life in a one day interactive, drama-based workshop.  

“RightTrack have delivered a number of sessions to our management team, including those directly involved in delivering education and training. The sessions cover more than the basics or material that can be delivered online. They use real cases, actors and examples from other industries and allow attendees to consider, reflect and discuss their views on a range of topics. These include equality and diversity core principles but it goes further as we look at topics such as unconscious bias and groups that aren’t “covered” by the equality act.

Recent sessions have received fantastic feedback. The sessions allow a safe environment to explore not only our responsibilities as an organisation, but also any risks and our role as individuals in such a wide and important topic.”

David Turner, Quality Support Manager, Regional Quality Function, Health Education England

The Impact

We have worked with HEE since 2011 to deliver a range of Equality, Diversity & Inclusion and Unconscious Bias drama workshop sessions as well as a session on Unconscious Bias in Recruitment. Some individuals that attended the original session some years ago have said they can still to this day remember the feelings that they got from watching the actor’s performance on the scenarios.

There continues to be overwhelmingly positive ratings and comments for this programme:

93% of delegates said that their knowledge & skill had increased as a result of attending this programme

100% of delegates understood what they have learned, were able to apply it to their roles and said that the programme will help them perform their roles better

  • “The acted-out scenarios made it more real”
  • “A safe place to discuss difficult things”
  • “Much more thorough and thought provoking than any other EDI training I have attended”
  • “Not fact heavy, felt real world”
  • “Course materials were relevant, interesting and stimulating”
  • “Great mixture of acting scenarios and large/small group discussions”
  • “Drama was excellent”
  • “Realistic drama…. rehearsed, convincing, felt real!”
  • “Much more useful and applicable to my role than standard e-learning”

We are now delivering more sessions for clinical and non-clinical staff, doctors, managers, nurses and technical staff.  Each time scenarios are written to address specific issues that have arisen or common scenarios within each team