The reality of systemic racism across all areas of life course – from Starting Well, through Living Well, Ageing Well and into Dying Well – continues to be stark.

From our focus on maternity, children’s and young people’s healthcare we see the very real impacts across avoidable mortality, wasted lives and potential. The impact of racism – in an increasingly divided, more fractured world simply cannot be ignored.

We know that the health inequality gap has grown between wealthy and deprived areas over the past decade, worsening existing inequalities in health outcomes for Black, Black British and Asian/Asian British Pakistani families in particular. Maternal health and the development of the foetus and baby are strongly influenced by the social, economic, and environmental circumstances that surround them. These social determinants of health mark the quality of health outcomes from birth until death, affecting all children, young people and their families. Our reality is one where 1 in 4 infant deaths could potentially be avoided if all families lived with the lowest level of deprivation.

At DDCS, we are passionate about working for a reality where this doesn’t have to be the case. Black, brown, and global majority communities must be afforded the best, most culturally competent and compassionate care, end-of-life services, and bereavement support available.

We aim to prevent child death with this in mind, working to tackle racial health inequalities in a holistic manner. All our efforts are dedicated to the deceased and bereaved.

We are still learning how to get it right and recognise that anti-racism is a lifelong effort.

We support and align our work with Five X More’s Black Maternity Experiences Survey’s legacy. In their words, “we can’t fix what we don’t understand”. At DDCS, we are committed to working in parallel to improve CDR data capture and quality on Black and global majority maternity, child and young person care.

We also support and align our work with Birthrights’ racial injustice inquiry’s calls to action for the maternity system to:

■ Commit to be an anti-racist organisation

■ Decolonise maternity curriculums and guidance

■ Make Black, Brown, and mixed ethnicity women and birthing people decision-makers in their care and the wider maternity system

■ Create safe, inclusive workforce cultures

■ Dismantle structural barriers to racial equity through national policy change ‍

It is essential that we look to, learn from, and centre key anti-racist initiatives and intersectional organisations within the CDR landscape to build our efforts connectively, rather than assert ourselves in an inconsiderate and dismissive manner.

In addition, we will:

■ Invest in supporting and participating in specific community-led initiatives (i.e. raising cultural awareness, heritage, and practices)

■ Centre and learn from recommendations, research, and policy initiatives from leading UK organisations on anti-racism, like SARI, Five X More, Hibiscus, Stand Up To Racism, and Race on the Agenda

■ Highlight racial health inequity and intersectional health inequity in our strategy, research and investigative work

■ Strengthen our partnerships and memberships with organisations that champion inclusivity and anti-racism

■ Invest in system-level improvements, reflected in company representation. We must always work to broaden the lived experiences of our employees to better work with our communities.

■ Identify and put improvements in place by regularly reflecting on company activities and strategy

■ Never tolerate discrimination, bullying, prejudice, and address them with appropriate action

■ Hold ourselves accountable by undertaking disability confidence, queer and trans-inclusive gender equity, and anti-racist training

■ Encourage and foster a safe, reflective and critical environment, where staff and work partners can bring forward improvements for company inclusivity and accessibility

■ Centre and learn from recommendations, research, and policy initiatives from leading UK organisations on disability, queer and trans rights and feminism, like Disability Rights UK, Amnesty UK, Stonewall, and Mermaids

■ Strengthen our partnerships with a broad range of community-based faith CDR services, working to make CDR more culturally competent

■ Invest in accessibility across DDCS, starting with providing accessibility tools for our website

■ Develop, implement and review our EDI Policy in consultation with the communities, organisations and people that are essential to CDR and our work

■ Ensure our recruitment process is inclusive

We are unyielding in our view that we must fight for and centre human rights, accessibility and inclusion in all our work for CDR to be better. More must always be done to ensure this.

Currently, CDR is underfunded, undervalued, riddled with health disparities, lacking, and not responsive enough to children, family, and professional needs. To improve our care systems, we must make CDR systems and partner work more accessible, inclusive, and safe. Above all, we must centre the children, parents, carers and communities we are here to serve.

Our goal to drive down inequalities not only concerns issues of social gradient and deprivation health disparities in our communities but also encompasses the fight against unhelpful hierarchies within clinical and social care-led systems. These systems need to provide a space of respect, trust, cultural competence and equity, where practitioners feel safe, comfortable and encouraged to engage with professional curiosity and proportionate challenge in a constructive way. Unconscious biases, seniority hierarchies, and medical biases are an obstacle to this.

Our commitment to accessibility and inclusivity also puts affordability at the centre of our services, driving us to work with public health providers on practical solutions, regardless of budget.

Led by compassion, we are respectful, culturally competent, empathetic and hopeful, dedicated to ensuring the best care and protecting the paramountcy of each infant, child and young person. We listen to healthcare professionals’, parent, carer, and family concerns, working towards an accessible, inclusive, and co-creative workplace.

We are committed to helping and learning from each other.

We work to have a diverse, compassionate team of professionals from a range of professional and lived backgrounds. Our differences are our strength, grounding us in multi-disciplinarity and inclusivity.

When recruiting, we welcome all applicants, especially people of colour, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. DDCS is proud to be a living wage employer and a supporter of the #NonGraduatesWelcome campaign.

It isn’t enough to simply be an ally and profess support for EDI. We must be seen to be taking positive steps, and be clear in our commitment and pride in working towards an equal society in any way we can.