Ethnicity Coding

The incidence, prevalence, and mortality of many diseases are known to vary by ethnic group.There are well documented inequities in access to prevention, treatment, and palliative health and social care services based on ethnic group. There are, too, reported differences in the quality of services received by different ethnic groups and of outcomes of treatment and care. Many of these inequities are amenable to change. However, in order to address them they must, first of all, be comprehensively defined and documented. Mainstreaming ethnic monitoring/data collection is a vital step in the process. The history of such data collection in the NHS is poor, whichever of the key datasets is examined: hospital episode statistics, general practitioner data, cancer registrations, and disease registers. While steps are now being taken to remedy some of these deficiencies, the continued non-availability of ethnic monitoring data and in some cases of compatible ethnically-coded denominator data remains a problem. In particular the lack of ethnic group in births and deaths data has been the subject of widespread comment by specialists in demography and public health and is probably the single action that could most improve the evidence based for addressing ethnic/racial inequalities in health and health care.