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Home Professional Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Accessibility

Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Accessibility

In 2020, the BAA board of directors made a commitment to review all aspects of our professional body regarding Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility.

To start the journey, our Vice President took the lead on forming a new committee around EDIA and invited any member of the BAA to join this committee. This is still an open invitation and members are welcome to join at any point.

The EDIA Team was created to:

  • Take all steps necessary to ensure that the BAA complies with the requirements of the Public Sector Equality Duty (The Equality Act 2010)
  • Engage with the BAA membership to identify challenges faced
  • Support the development of an inclusive non-discriminatory environment for all
  • To hold the BAA board accountable to sustained commitment towards EDIA initiatives

Our next action was to call on the services of an EDIA consultant to set us off in the right direction. Jill Scott advised that before we did much else, we really need to understand who our members are.

Therefore, our first two objectives were to 1) change our sign-up questions for members to better understand our member profile and 2) create a survey to find out more about our current membership.

The membership form has been updated on our website, so when members next login they can provide a little more information about themselves (if they wish to). And our membership survey has been completed by several hundred audiologists. The survey was so important to help us:

  • to understand the demographics of the BAA membership, their accessibility needs and priorities with regards to EDI
  • to identify the areas of concern within the BAA and work towards improvement

The results from the membership survey are currently being analysed and we will publish further information on this site, in our member magazine and we will also be sharing top level results from it at our Annual Conference 18th & 19th November in Manchester. Down the infographic EDIA Survey Infographic for conference 2021.

Amongst other outcomes, we hope the survey will help us to investigate training opportunities regarding Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, to hold broad discussions to understand lived experiences of inequality and to work to better include those who are under-represented in our profession.

Whilst there might not seem to have been much public activity around the survey or our work around Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility, we can assure you there has been lots of work going on in the background.

Things that we have learned so far and have asked Board to improve:

  • Changes had been made to BAA sign up form
  • Website
    • Working on new photos and diversity of images for the website
    • Working to make the website more accessible
  • Ensure videos have captions or signpost to the YouTube facility
  • Working together with the Board to make sure that the process to join a committee and Board elections are transparent, open and accessible for everyone
  • Working with Jill Scott (equality, diversity and inclusion specialist) make sure we create the right content for training and support

For the future:

  • Write an EDIA Policy and a Best Practice Document
  • Unconscious Bias & Microaggression workbooks for members use
  • Webinars regarding anti-bias and cultural awareness for our membership

We are in the process of planning the next steps of our journey and we are looking at a number of ways to ensure our members get a chance to feed into the conversations about our actions and commitments moving forward. Every Heads of Service and members’ webinar will include reports on recent EDI activities and articles will be included in the magazine. It’s important to us that our members feel empowered to contribute to these conversations and have a voice, so please contact us at anytime through admin@baaudiology.org

We are currently recruiting a few more members:

We embrace diversity at the BAA. To build an organisation that is beneficial for  everyone we need a team with all kinds of different perspectives, experiences and backgrounds.  That’s why we are encouraging people from different backgrounds, race, religion, national origin, gender, identity, sexual orientation or disability to apply for it.

If anyone is interested you can email admin@baaudiology.org