NHS Race and Health Observatory, the University of Liverpool and the University of Warwick have collaborated to produce a report entitled ‘Mapping existing policy interventions to tackle ethnic health inequalities in maternal and neonatal health in England: a systematic scoping review with stakeholder engagement’.
For the purpose of the review, a number of sources were examined including five electronic databases, the Journal of Health Visiting, and reports and websites from relevant organisations. Experts were also contacted to identify grey literature, with nineteen studies on evaluated interventions included overall.
The researchers grouped the interventions into six levels: patient, provider, organisation, microsystem, community and policy.
The review has highlighted several research gaps such as the fact that most of the evaluations were conducted in London and that most of the interventions were evaluated in single studies and took an observational or qualitative form. The review did not identify any evaluation of interventions designed to tackle institutional or interpersonal racism such as tackling ethnic stereotyping and supporting people with previous experience of discrimination in a healthcare setting.
Several recommendations are highlighted as a result. Examples include the development of an interactive portal on the NHS Improvement Maternity Transformation website for teams to register their interventions, in order to capture what is happening across the country; the adoption of a consensus on baseline measures of risk factors for inequalities in adverse perinatal outcomes as agreed by the Maternal Medicine Networks; and detailed policy analysis to ensure the co-development of a specific policy targeted at the reduction of ethnic health inequalities.
To read the report in full, please click here.
