Local Action on Health Inequalities: Understanding and Reducing Ethnic Inequalities in Health
Understanding and reducing ethnic inequalities in healthLed by Public Health England, and co-produced with University of Sheffield and the UCL Institute of Health Equity, this report aims to inform local and national action by PHE and other bodies.
Effective action on ethnic health inequalities will help meet the legal duty on the Secretary of State for Health, NHS England, Clinical Commissioning Groups to have regard to the need to reduce health inequalities and to comply with the Equality Act 2010.
The resource aims to:
- promote an integrated approach to reducing health inequalities by drawing out relationships between different forms of inequality and by highlighting the root causes
- clarify basic concepts and terms
- provide material on ethnicity and health for use in local joint strategic needs assessments and local health and wellbeing strategies
- inform local discussion and action on ethnic health inequalities
- identify key gaps in data by ethnic group and areas in need of better evidence for action.
It comprises the following components:
- Summarising the data
- Approaches to address ethnic inequalities in health
- Practice examples
Important messages have been identified to support better focus on ethnicity within action on health inequalities:
- Mainstreaming ethnicity
- Influencing decision-makers and role of senior leadership
- Data collection, analysis and reporting
- Action on the wider social and economic determinants
- Tackling racism and ethnic discrimination
- Commissioning of culturally sensitive health promotion interventions
- Improving access, experiences and outcomes of health services
- Engagement with minority ethnic groups
- Making use of evidence
A blog on local action on ethnic health inequalities accompanies this report.
The Local Action on Health Inequalities series provides case studies, and examples of good practice for local areas. This LAHI overview document provides an introduction to the series.