Equity, diversity and inclusion

The King’s Fund is committed to supporting equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), both in our own work and across health and care systems. This is essential to deliver our vision and mission.

Our approach

At The King’s Fund we recognise, respect and value the nine protected characteristics.

We also recognise each other’s differences as essential to how we work with each other. We appreciate difference as a source of learning, creativity and effectiveness.

The illustration below gives some examples of the different attributes that people bring to their roles.

We’re also increasing and improving how we involve people, patients and communities in our work.

Celebrating our diversity

EDI work can often be challenging, and it can take time to bring about change. It can also create incredible moments of joy and celebration. Below are some of our key highlights from the past few years.

Our priorities at the Fund

Our equity, diversity and inclusion programme

We have a wide-ranging programme of work to support us in becoming a more diverse and inclusive organisation. These include our commitment to addressing slavery and colonialism through our published action plan. Our priorities in 2025 include:

• People management: ensuring that our approach to people management training incorporates inclusion and wellbeing, with a particular focus on how leaders engage with EDI work. We will also work to embed a newly refreshed suite of HR policies.

• Workforce and customer diversity profile: working across the Fund to develop a robust and consistent approach to the collection and reporting of EDI data; this includes workforce data (including recruitment), event and speaker data, open programme applicants, and bursaries.

• Inclusive recruitment and onboarding: understanding our employee profile, what is meant by inclusive recruitment, and embedding best practice across all stages of the recruitment and onboarding process.

• Anti-racism training: rolling out anti-racism training to another cohort in the Fund.

• EDI communication and engagement: implementing principles for engaging with social justice, anti-racism and EDI-related issues, externally and internally.

• Heighten awareness of socio-economic status and class, disability and neurodiversity: working with directorates, programme leads and staff networks to develop our focus on socio-economic status, class, disability and neurodiversity.

• Mental health and wellbeing focus: drafting and signing off a Mental Health and Wellbeing policy for the Fund.

Organisational targets

Although The King’s Fund takes an intersectional approach to its inclusion work, we do have specific priority areas for data collection across the organisation. This helps us hold ourselves accountable to promoting a diversity of voices across all levels of the organisation, among our networks, and at our events (see our annual report).

Sex/Gender

• 50/50 male/female split in the senior decision-makers group by 2027

• No all-male panels at our conferences and events

Ethnicity

• 20% representation of people from ethnic minority backgrounds in the senior decision-makers group

• 20% of speakers at The King’s Fund will be from an ethnic minority background

Disability

• Ensuring that our building and resources are completely accessible

• Start collecting disability/long-term condition data in 2025 on staff but also, eg, speakers at our events etc.