Increasing the ethnic diversity of senior leadership within the English National Health Service: using an artificial intelligence approach to evaluate inclusive recruitment strategies in hospital settings.

Journal: Human resources for health
Published Date: May 22, 2025

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The English National Health Service (NHS) strives for a fair, diverse, and inclusive workplace, but Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) representation in senior leadership roles remains limited. To address this, a large multi-hospital acute NHS Trust introduced an inclusive recruitment programme, requiring ethnically and gender diverse interview panels and a letter to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) explaining hiring manager's candidate choice. This generated large amount of valuable structured and free-text data, but manual analysis to derive actionable insights is challenging, limiting efforts to evaluate and improve such equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) recruitment initiatives.

Authors

  • Sarindi Aryasinghe
    iCARE Secure Data Environment, NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK. s.aryasinghe@imperial.ac.uk.
  • Catalina Carenzo
    iCARE Secure Data Environment, NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK.
  • Kerri-Ann Barnett
    Office of the Chief Executive and People and Organisational Development Directorate, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK.
  • Rabia Khalid
    Office of the Chief Executive and People and Organisational Development Directorate, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK.
  • Koya Greenaway-Harvey
    Office of the Chief Executive and People and Organisational Development Directorate, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK.
  • Colleen Sherlock
    Office of the Chief Executive and People and Organisational Development Directorate, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK.
  • Louise Clark
    Office of the Chief Executive and People and Organisational Development Directorate, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK. louise.clark20@nhs.net.
  • Kevin Croft
    Office of the Chief Executive and People and Organisational Development Directorate, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK.
  • Tim Orchard
    Office of the Chief Executive and People and Organisational Development Directorate, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK.
  • Erik Mayer
    Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, London, UK.

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