About Fair For All Gender
A partnership project between Scottish Government and Equality and Human Rights Commission. Part of the wider Fair For All initiative.
Fair for All, a NHS Scotland framework for achieving culturally competent health services (HDL (2002) 51) , was established alongside the National Resource Centre for Ethnic Minority Health in response to the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000), as part of the Health Department's work on Patient Focus and Public Involvement (PFPI).
Partnership for Care (2003) committed to develop the Fair for All approach further to ensure that 'whatever the individual circumstances of people's lives … they have access to the right health services for their needs'. Importantly, to support the
Executive's commitment to social justice and bridging the opportunity gap for all, it defined life circumstances widely to include, 'age, gender, ethnicity, disability, religion, sexual orientation, mental health, economic or other circumstances'. The NHS Reform (Scotland) Act gave statutory underpinning to this approach by imposing duties of 'public involvement' and 'equal opportunities' on NHS Boards.
Delivering for Health consolidated this approach by placing the reduction of health inequalities at the centre of NHS business. By so doing it set the expectation that the health of the population would continue to improve and committing us to ensuring that 'everyone had the same opportunity to experience that improvement'.
The expectation has been that the Fair for All approach will enable NHS Scotland become the exemplar public sector service provider. To support Boards achieve this, Fair for All initiatives were established to consider the health needs and service experiences of communities across the six equality strands -
age, disability, gender, race, religion / belief and sexual orientation. Support for Boards included facilitating learning networks, production of guidance, providing research and information and developing targeted approaches to addressing the specific health concerns of their constituent