A new briefing paper, ‘Ethnicity and prehospital emergency care provided by ambulance services‘, was published today by The Race Equality Foundation. The paper was co-authored by Viet-Hai Phung, Professor Niro Siriwardena, and Dr Zahid Asghar from CaHRU and Dr Karen Windle from the School of Health and Social Care.
It builds on work that CaHRU is undertaking on people from minority groups and their prehospital care. The briefing paper describes the inequalities in access to, as well as treatment and outcomes from, prehospital care for minority ethnic groups in the UK. It discusses how inequalities are driven by factors that include limited cultural awareness among service providers, as well as limited language proficiency and understanding of the healthcare system among these patients groups and how these inequalities manifest themselves in differences in treatment and outcomes.
The paper goes on to examine the implications arising from these inequalities for service delivery, especially since increasing ethnic diversity is raising issues of equality and equity higher up the legislative and policy agendas. It concludes by exploring potential solutions, which include: a more integrated approach to collecting patient ethnicity data; interventions that target at-risk groups in particular locations; and better cultural competency training for service providers.
Viet-Hai Phung