Delivering effective NHS services to our multiethnic population: collection and application of ethnic monitoring within primary care

Government health policy has emphasised the importance of understanding and tackling ethnic disparities in health and healthcare for at least four decades. Yorkshire & the Humber includes areas with large, well-established minority ethnic populations. In addition, most cities in the region, including those that have in the past been dominated by the White British majority, are now experiencing rapid migration. Persistent patterns of health disadvantage among established minority ethnic communities are now compounded by the differing health needs of new migrant populations. NHS organisations in Yorkshire & the Humber have begun to respond more systematically to the needs of minority ethnic groups. However, there is still progress to be made on establishing basic requirements for effective commissioning, including effective ethnic monitoring systems that provide high quality intelligence to commissioners, service managers and health professionals. While there are examples of innovation and good practice, there is significant variation across the region and a lack of sharing and learning between organisations. Here we report on a workshop that was convened by the Strategic Health Authority in June 2009 as a first step towards addressing this recognised area of need. The Workshop Chair was John Chuter, Chair of NHS Bradford & Airedale. The aims of the workshop were to: • Highlight the policy context and imperatives for ethnic monitoring. • Raise awareness of the current position with regard to ethnic monitoring and use of data in Yorkshire & the Humber. • Share emerging good practice. • Identify ways to move forward to improved ethnic monitoring across the region

Nursing research for a multi-ethnic society

Summary points • Conducting research that appropriately and sensitively pays attention to ethnicity presents an important challenge to nursing researchers and demands particular competencies. • Nursing research must recognise the multifaceted nature of ethnicity and the varied ways in which health-related experiences and outcomes may be associated with ethnicity. • Ethnic identities are complex and fluid so that using fixed ethnic categories in research requires careful consideration. • Describing and explaining differences between ethnic 'groups' demands careful attention to sampling, data generation and analysis so that partial or misleading interpretations are avoided. • Researchers should be alert to the potential for research on minority ethnic groups to do more harm than good and should seek to ensure that their research focus and approach is informed by the experiences and priorities of these groups

Reducing Health Inequalities Implementation Theme. Briefing paper 1: Why health inequalities matter

This first briefing paper is an account of why health inequality matters and why health inequalities deserve consideration across all areas of CLAHRC (SY) activity. We begin by briefly reviewing the policy landscape and the prominence of 'inequality' as a growing focus of concern over the past 30 years. We then set out the type of philosophical and political considerations that may underpin the view that health inequality is a problem. Next we identify the main axes of inequality with which we suggest CLAHRC (SY) should concern itself. In the next section of the paper we set out the extent of health inequality in South Yorkshire, as far as available data allow. Finally, we show the relevance of health inequality across the CLAHRC (SY) themes and raise for discussion the implications for CLAHRC (SY) activity

Using participatory, observational and ‘Rapid Appraisal’ methods: researching health and illness

This chapter reports on the experiences and lessons learned through the use of participatory, locality-based data generation methods to research the intersections between long-term illhealth and poverty among four different ethnic 'communities'

Reducing Health Inequalities Implementation Theme. Briefing Paper 2: How to incorporate attention to inequality in CLAHRC (SY) activity.

In Briefing Paper 1 we set out the rationale for having an "Inequalities in health" theme as part of the CLAHRC (SY) activity. In this second briefing paper we show how research conducted under the aegis of CLAHRC (SY) can address issues of health inequality

Associating characters with events in films

The work presented here combines the analysis of a film's audiovisual features with the analysis of an accompanying audio description. Specifically, we describe a technique for semantic-based indexing of feature films that associates character names with meaningful events. The technique fuses the results of event detection based on audiovisual features with the inferred on-screen presence of characters, based on an analysis of an audio description script. In an evaluation with 215 events from 11 films, the technique performed the character detection task with Precision = 93% and Recall = 71%. We then go on to show how novel access modes to film content are enabled by our analysis. The specific examples illustrated include video retrieval via a combination of event-type and character name and our first steps towards visualization of narrative and character interplay based on characters occurrence and co-occurrence in events