Protected characteristics, discrimination, and human rights

In Great Britain, the Equality Act protects people with respect to age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. In care settings these protections apply to residents, relatives and staff.

Different forms of unlawful or unfair treatment

• Direct discrimination: treating someone worse because of a protected characteristic.
• Indirect discrimination: applying a rule or routine that appears neutral but disadvantages a group without good reason.
• Harassment: unwanted behaviour that violates dignity or creates a hostile, humiliating, degrading, or offensive environment.
• Victimisation: treating someone badly because they raised, supported, or were linked to a complaint.

Human rights also apply in care. Residential services should support privacy, family life, dignity, freedom from degrading treatment, and fair involvement in decisions. Care that ignores identity, mocks difference, or excludes people from normal choices can breach both equality duties and human rights.

How discrimination may appear in care homes

• Dismissing a resident's communication need: then labelling them difficult.
• Talking over someone: or addressing only their relative because of age, disability, accent, or diagnosis.
• Making jokes about staff or residents: for example about race, sexuality, disability, faith, menopause, or nationality.
• Using rigid routines: that ignore cultural diets, prayer, privacy needs, or disability adjustments.
• Punishing someone for speaking up: by changing shifts, isolating them, or labelling them a troublemaker.

In residential care, discrimination is not only overt hostility. It can appear in routines, jokes, assumptions, exclusion, poor communication, and in how people are treated after raising concerns.