Ethnic minorities: policy context

 

Equality Legislation

Recently, the Equality Act 2010  has consolidated the previous legislation around preventing discrimination and improving equality of opportunity and good relations. The Act applies to both the private and public sectors, however there are additional provisions for the public sector and guidance has been published by the UK Home Office Equalities Unit. The previous legislation on ethnicity included the Race Relations (Amendment) Act (2000) , which amended the earlier Race Relations Act 1976.

 

Equally Well and Fair for All

In June 2008 the Scottish Government published Equally Well, the report of the ministerial task force on health inequalities. The report recommended a review of data needs in relation to diversity (recommendation 74) and recommended that NHS targets should be set to support work on patient monitoring and collection of equalities data (recommendation 75). The supporting papersinclude (chapter 10) a useful review of inequalities related to ethnicity.

The Scottish Government set up the Equalities and Planning Directorate in 2008 as a unit of NHS Health Scotland and as a centre of expert advice and support to NHS Scotland on delivering equality and diversity, eliminating discrimination and reducing health inequalities. The Scottish Government then published the Equally Well Implementation Plan in December 2008.

To support policy implementation, NHS Scotland had previously launched an Equality and Diversity Impact Assessment Toolkit in 2005.

In Scotland, the response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent Macpherson report (1999) included the 'Fair for All' policy initiative outlined in the Scottish Executive Health Department Letter 2002/51(111Kb). This required Scottish NHS organisations to:

  • make a clear commitment to address the challenge of ethnic minority health,
  • develop a local demographic profile,
  • ensure equitable access to services by all ethnic groups,
  • include ethnicity in human resource strategies,
  • involve ethnic minority communities in service development.

All Scottish NHSboards have Fair for All and Race Equality schemes, which should set out how they intend to ensure that they are delivering culturally competent services. Requirements for the NHS in Scotland to provide appropriate religious and spiritual care for minority ethnic groups are set out in the Scottish Executive Health Department Letter 2002/76(97Kb).

Addressing the needs of ethnic minorities is increasingly being set in the context of a broader equality and diversity agenda. This examines six "diversity strands": in addition to ethnicity these include age, gender, disability, religion and sexual orientation. These wider issues are summarised in a leaflet published in 2004 and entitled Fair for All, 2001(100Kb).

 

Equality Data

The Review of Equality Health Data Needs in Scotland arose from Equally Well recommendation 74 as mentioned above, and will be published in 2012. A helpful overview of the role of data improvement through linkage techniques, in the context of the wider problem of improving the cultural sensitivity of health care systems in Scotland (Bhopal 2012b) is given in Key references.  The Scottish Health and Ethnicity Research Strategy Steering group(SHERSS) was set up in December 2010 as recommended by the Health in Our Multi-ethnic Scotland report . SHERSS made its first annual report in December 2011.

The Scottish Government has developed harmonised survey questions which include the new ethnicity classification as used in Scotland's 2011 census and recommended for use in all relevant Scottish Official Statistics. The new ethnicity categories for use in Scottish Morbidity Record (SMR) returns which collect hospital discharge data can be found in ISD's data dictionary.

 

Equality Research

The Scottish Health and Ethnicity Research Strategy Steering group(SHERSS) was set up in December 2010 as recommended by the Health in Our Multi-ethnic Scotland report . SHERSS made its first annual report (87Kb)in December 2011.

In November 2009 NHS Health Scotland published Health in our Multi-ethnic Scotland. This report set out a proposed strategy for research on the health of ethnic minorities in Scotland.