Britain’s social care services are used, by people from a wide diversity of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Services therefore need to be accessible. We need to make particular efforts to reach out to vulnerable people who might have been deterred from approaching agencies which appear no to relate to their special needs and aspirations, and to demonstrate that we welcome and celebrate the wide range of people in the community generally among the users of services in particular. We respond to service users’ right to express their diversity in the following ways.
- Positively communicating to our service users that their diverse backgrounds enhance the life of the community.
- Respecting the ethnic, cultural and religious practices of service users.
- Outlawing negatively discriminatory behaviour by staff and others.
- Accommodating individual differences with censure.
- Helping service users to celebrate events, anniversaries and festivals, which are important to them