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28 - Informing progress towards race equality in mental healthcare: is routine data collection adequate?

from Part 3 - Management issues in the cultural context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Peter J. Aspinall
Affiliation:
Professor of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
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Summary

Summary Collection of ethnicity data in mental health services has long been regarded as unsatisfactory. The Department of Health's 5-year action plan Delivering Race Equality in Mental Health Care seeks to improve this key building block by setting out actions to improve both the quality of information and its analysis and dissemination. However, actions that are tangible and specific are few. The opportunity to improve the quality and coverage of key routine data-sets has not been seized. Moreover, the plan does not mention proposed changes in civil registration (births and deaths) and the coroner service and their potential benefit. This chapter looks at what has been achieved since the 5-year action plan was published and takes stock of progress in this, its fifth and final year. The continuing gaps in the information base justify a stronger emphasis on the processes necessary to bring about change rather than on what ethnic monitoring should provide.

It has long been recognised that the quality, completeness and comprehensiveness of the ethnicity data collected in mental health services are inadequate. This is acknowledged in Delivering Race Equality in Mental Health Care (Department of Health, 2005a), which lays out the Department's 5-year action plan for achieving race equality and tackling discrimination in mental health services in England for people in minority ethnic groups. Moreover, this plan for reform – together with the government's formal response to the independent inquiry into the death of David Bennett, which appears in the same document – offers a programme for achieving equality of access, experiences and outcomes for service users from these groups.

A crucial element of this programme and one of its three building blocks is ‘better information’, including improvements in the monitoring of ethnicity and its analysis and dissemination. The preceding race equality consultation document, dubbed the Framework for Action (Department of Health, 2003a), had invoked practitioners ‘to look for outliers’ – although not specifying the required tools, such as funnel plots (Spiegelhalter, 2002) and Shewart charts (Mohammed et al, 2001), to do so.

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Publisher: Royal College of Psychiatrists
Print publication year: 2010

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