Most UK datasets of routinely collected health statistics fail to collect information on ethnicity and religion
Most UK datasets of routinely collected health statistics fail to collect information on ethnicity and religion
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大多数英国常规收集的健康统计数据集未能收集有关种族和宗教的信息
DOI：
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发表时间：
2008
影响因子：
17.3
通讯作者：
A. Sheikh
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
K. Sultana;A. Sheikh
减少种族不平等是英国政府长期以来宣布的优先事项，1但是，尽管向所有阶层的人口提供公平的医疗保健在道德上和法律上都是必要的，但在实现这一目标方面取得进展的证据非常有限。最近，新工党还致力于解决2001年人口普查数据分析显示的在健康和社会结果方面非常严重的宗教不平等问题。2在健康结果方面几乎肯定存在许多其他多元社会中类似的种族和宗教不平等现象。
The reduction of ethnic inequalities is a long-declared UK government priority,1 but despite the moral and increasingly legal imperative to provide equitable healthcare to all sections of the population, there is very limited evidence of progress in achieving this objective. More recently, New Labour has also committed itself to tackling the very considerable religious inequalities in health and social outcomes that have become evident from analysis of data from the 2001 Census.2 Similar ethnic and religious inequalities in health outcomes almost certainly exist in many other pluralist societies.
Given the difficulties in reducing health inequalities for certain disorders, the very considerable gaps remaining in our knowledge in relation to minority communities for many other conditions, and the known under-representation of minority groups in research (both in the UK and US),3,4 it is important that every effort is made to make use of existing data sources to describe and understand the nature of ethnic- and faith-based variations in health outcomes, and assess progress in tackling these inequalities.
The UK enjoys some of the foremost datasets of routinely collected health statistics, and greater exploitation of these is potentially of considerable importance to shaping policy, prioritizing research and identifying foci for service delivery improvements. In order to investigate the fitness for purpose of these datasets, we sought to interrogate them for evidence of inclusion of ethnicity and faith variables and, where recorded, to see whether there was a consistent approach to recording that would allow comparisons between datasets.