how anti-discriminatory practice is promoted in health and social care settings

It is important for workers who work for a health and social sector to promote equality, value diversity and respect the rights of service users. There are various ways of how they can challenge discriminatory issues and practices in health and social care. One of the ways in which care worker can promote equality, value diversity and respect the rights of service users is to always put the patient/service user at the heart of the service provision. This means that the patients' individual needs will be met and achieved for example; a personal eating plan to a specific individual. Putting the service user at the centre of the provision generally makes a happier and healthier patient in all areas. Care workers can help achieve this by:
• Understanding what it is like to use those services
• Involving those who use the services in all aspects of their care and development at all levels
• Providing people with the information they need to make informed choices about their own care and making decisions about the way services are run.
• Asking service what they would like and prefer instead of making decisions for them

This also means that by providing them with support consistent of their beliefs, culture and preferences, service providers will not treat service users less fairly because they have different views and preferences to themselves.

Also, if service providers do not agree with the choice their patient is making due to personal preferences then they should still provide them with that active support and ensure that there patient knows that the support is available to them. Balancing individual rights with rights of others also actively promotes anti-discriminatory practice. Care workers can balance rights by giving all service users equal opportunities and often compromises are needed to be made. Individual rights refer to the rights of individuals; this must balance out equally with the rights of others.

An example of this could be a resident with a right to privacy but shares a room with another resident who continuously invades his space and looks through his things and causes distraction when he is trying to read then he would be breaching the patients right to privacy. However, the other patients right to be treated equally and have a companion in the home would then be breached if he had to be moved into a different room on his own. Therefore the patient will need appropriate explanations on what is appropriate behaviour regarding privacy and possibly a new set of rules to obide by so that resident A is getting his right to privacy whilst resident B is also getting his right to be treated equally. To stop discrimination, care workers must first identifty and challenge the discrimination. To identify the discrimination they would need to determine what bases it was on such as racial, sexual etc and ensuring that people are aware of the dangers of discrimination