Council to review health inequalities
Birmingham and Lewisham councils will hold their own investigation into health inequalities as questions are raised about the “narrow” scope of the Government’s Covid-19 review.
The joint project comes as it is reported black Britons are two to four times more likely to die from coronavirus than the white population, according to analysis by the Office for National Statistics.
Councillor Paulette Hamilton, cabinet member for health and social care at Birmingham City Council, has expressed concerns about Public Health England’s (PHE) review into the disproportionate impact of coronavirus on ethnic minority communities.
She has called on the investigation being carried out by UK health chiefs to be upgraded into a public inquiry rather than something that is “held privately” and “goes nowhere”.
The Birmingham and Lewisham African & Caribbean Health Inequalities Review (BLACHIR) will run over an 18-month period and is intended to recommend changes “to address decades of inequalities”.
It will examine health inequalities affecting black communities in both local authority areas, including “wider determinants of health” such as housing, employment and education.
A statement from Birmingham City Council states these problems “have been exacerbated by Covid-19 and undoubtedly underpin some of the excess deaths in these populations”.
Black African and Black Caribbean residents made up 7.2 per cent of the population of Birmingham in the 2011 census, compared to 2.9 per cent in England.
Residents in the Black African, Black Caribbean and Black Other groups made up 27.2 per cent of the population of Lewisham the same year.
The two local authorities have previously worked together as part of the Childhood Obesity Trailblazer Programme, and were already planning to conduct a project along these lines before the pandemic.
Speaking at the weekly West Midlands Combined Authority media briefing on Thursday, Councillor Hamilton said: “We have been doing work for nearly a year now relating to Childhood Obesity Trailblazer which was run by Public Health England.
“We found a similarity between ourselves and Lewisham as such that we were going to start this piece of work […] before the pandemic actually started.
“With the advent of the pandemic we had to hold back for a little bit.
“But as everybody knows, because I haven’t hidden it, I do not agree with the remits of the review being undertaken by PHE. It’s become very narrow and it’s something to bury the issues.
“For me, unless we have a public inquiry or something that is looking into the deeper inequalities you are not going to get to some of the real answers that we want.
“That’s why in Birmingham and Lewisham we felt this was the right time to actually start that piece of work.
“We will start with the African and Caribbean communities but we will move straight onto the southern Asian community.
“The plan is to have an ongoing piece of work so we don’t get to the point where we are at at this moment ever again around equalities.”
Also at the briefing was Dr Rashmi Shukla CBE, Public Health England’s regional director for the Midlands and East of England.
Dr Shukla talked about the review which had been commissioned by the Government, which aims to publish findings by the end of this month.
She said: “The review will analyse how different factors including ethnicity, deprivation, age, gender and obesity can impact on people’s health outcomes from the virus.
“PHE will also be looking at available data on health outcomes for NHS staff to develop a better understanding of how the virus affects the frontline workforce.
“We will also look at vulnerable groups such as people experiencing homelessness and rough sleeping.
“This review will entail examination of thousands of existing health records of people with Covid-19 so that we can have more robust data on the factors that impact on cases and health outcomes for these different population groups.
“This will give us insight into emerging evidence on how Covid-19 may be having a disproportionate impact on different groups.
“We have talked in the past about the concerns we have about the impact on black, Asian and minority ethnic groups which will be an important focus of this work too."
She said the work will engage devolved administrations, faith groups, voluntary sector organisations, local government, academics, Royal Medical Colleges and others.
