Harjit Bansal is head of equality, diversity and inclusion at North East London Foundation Trust and also sits on the NHS Staff Council Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Group. This week Harjit guest wrote a blog for NHS Employers on using ESR functionality to better understand the diverse makeup of our workforce.

Harjit's Blog: 

It was two years ago that I discovered ESR. The system had all the data I required to run my equality, diversity and inclusion reports and all I needed was permission from my manager to assess it. As I’m not a HR member of staff, I am restricted to what I have access to as the head of equality, diversity and inclusion - HR has access to much more. Once I had permission and access to the section called business intelligence, there was no stopping me! Work began on scrutinising data to support the organisation to explore where the gaps were and any gaps in data being uploaded - a system is only as good as the information that is fed into it.

There are currently 99 per cent of trusts that use ESR and it holds data for over 1.4 million staff. Staff who have access to this system within my organisation do not use it effectively and I decided it was time to take some action.

An ESR task and finish group was created, Alice Sorby, co-chair of the pan London Equality and Diversity Group and Paul Deemer at NHS Employers were pivotal in setting-up the group, supported by Kieron Walsh from ESR.

The objectives of the group were to look at:

• what functionality was already available
• how easy and accessible the system was
• how the system could be improved and developed further
• how we could promote it.

Read the full blog here.