Responding to employee-based race inequalities in National Health Service (England): accountability and the Workforce Race Equality Standard

Purpose This paper examines the efforts of National Health Service (England) (NHSE) to respond to employee-based racial inequalities via its Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES). The WRES constitutes a hybridised accountability initiative with characteristics of the moral and imposed regimes of accountability. Design/methodology/approach The study conceptualises the notion of responsive race accountability with recourse to Favotto et al .’s (2022) moral accountability model and critical race theory (CRT), and through it, examines the enactment of WRES at 40 NHSE trusts using qualitative content analysis. Findings Despite the progressive nature of the WRES that seeks to nurture corrective actions, results suggest that trusts tend to adopt an instrumental approach to the exercise. Whilst there is some evidence of good practice, the instrumental approach prevails across both the metric reporting that trusts engage in to guide their actions, and the planned actions for progress. These planned actions not only often fail to coalesce with the trust-specific data but also include generic NHSE or equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives and mimetic adoptions of best practice guidance that only superficially address racial concerns. Social implications Whilst the WRES is a laudable voluntary achievement, its moral imperative does not appear to have translated into a moral accountability within individual trusts. Originality/value Responding to calls for more research at the accounting-race nexus, this study uniquely draws on CRT to conceptualise and examine race accountability.