Equity, diversity and inclusion

Our Initiatives

Flexible Working Arrangements

The Faculty of Medicine and Health flexible working arrangements are in addition to and complement the University’s arrangements. The aim of this policy is to allow all staff to reduce their hours with a guarantee of returning to their original contracted hours within a five year period. This policy provides additional benefits to that offered by the University’s provision – it does not replace any current arrangements.

Further details can be found here and the application form can be downloaded here.

Menopause Guidance

Menopause is a natural part of every woman’s life and yet the menopause and its potential impact is rarely discussed in the workplace. Two sets of guidence is now available for staff and managers, and raises awareness of support available to assist with the management of menopausal symptoms in the workplace.

The guidance can be found here. 

Purchasing Additional Annual Leave

This scheme allows staff to purchase additional leave days. These can either be taken as a period of unpaid leave with the proportion of salary to be deducted in the month the leave is taken, or as a number of days leave to be available as additional holiday throughout the year and ‘repaid’ through salary deduction on a monthly basis.

Additional details can be found here and the application form can be downloaded here.

Return to Work Guidelines (following an extended absence)

This offers guidance for managers on supporting staff returning from maternity leave, long term sickness or other periods of long term absence. The document can be downloaded here.

Female Leaders Network

The Female Leaders Network was launched in October 2014 and bring together like minded people from different areas of health care within the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and the University of Leeds. The network’s long term aim is to develop, build and maintain strong female leaders across the health care sectors in Leeds. We wish to inspire women, by building on confidence, capabilities and contacts, through linking in with other local and national initiatives and developing relationships with established female leaders’ networks from other sectors.

The network is well established, and the Executive, together with leaders and managers across the Faculty should encourage female leaders, and potential future leaders to join and actively engage in the network. You can read more about the network here.

Academic Development Fund

The aim of this funding (up to £15k per person) is to enable academic staff to maintain their academic trajectory and advancement of their academic career whilst on a period of leave or to enable them to re-engage with it at the end of the break. It is intended that the additional funding will enable staff to maintain and develop their research and professional career whilst on leave.  Academic staff can apply for this financial to provide support during OR following a period of maternity, parental, adoption, shared parental leave, a career break taken to undertake caring responsibilities or sickness absence. 

Further details can be found here and the application form can be downloaded here.

Breastfeeding / Wellbeing Rooms

Information on breastfeeding and Wellbeing Room facilities in the faculty can be found here.

Details of breastfeeding facilities around campus can be found here.  Baby change facilities are marked on the main campus map.

Promotions

Promotions Guidance:

Faculty HR have produced guidance to supplement the information about promotion that is available on the main HR website. This explains how the promotions process is managed in this Faculty, and is available here.

Promotions advisors:

In addition to your Faculty HRM/HRO there are a number of people across the faculty who have experience of the promotions process who can advise you.  A list of promotions advisors is here or please contact your HRM/HRO for a contact. Whilst the advisors cannot tell you whether or not your application meets the criteria they can advise on e.g. whether or not you appear to have provided sufficient supportive evidence for the level of the role you are applying for, and whether the application is clear. They will not make a judgement on whether or not the application is likely to succeed.

Exit interviews

We have introduced a new process of face to face exit interviews for staff leaving us. We hope by talking to staff who are leaving we can understand the reasons why and make positive changes to our working environment as a result of this feedback. In the past we have sent a link to an online survey but responses to this have been low.

When HR receives notification that you are leaving you will be contacted with a list of independent interviewers and can choose who to meet with. The meeting is completely confidential. HR will use the data to produce quarterly anonymised statistical and qualitative reports to highlight trends or key issues which we need to address. All the relevant documents can be downloaded here.

University of Leeds HR Policies

For further guidance and for information about the policies and values that underpin the initiatives within the Faculty of Medicine and Health please visit the main University Human Resource pages for all our policies. You can find this here.

Get in touch

We would welcome all feedback so do get in touch with any comments, suggestions or questions to Ruth Buller.