Asthma UK slams inadequate services for ethnic communities » Health » 24dash.com

Asthma UK is calling on the NHS to take crucial steps to safeguard the health of Black and minority ethnic (BME) groups who are being let down by their current services.

Speaking Up, a new report by Asthma UK, reveals that many people from minority ethnic backgrounds in England are regularly confronted with poor and inaccessible services from the NHS.

Without adequate support and information, they struggle to control their asthma and are forced to live with unnecessary symptoms that can escalate into life-threatening asthma attacks and emergency hospital admissions.

In England people from BME communities are among the most severely affected by their asthma, with research showing that compared with the white population, South Asian people are three times more likely to require an emergency hospital admission for their asthma and Black people are twice as likely.

Of the people from BME communities interviewed for this report, more than two thirds did not have their asthma symptoms under control with almost half saying that their asthma had limited their social lives and a third saying that their asthma had held them back at work.

Around one in twenty either had no doctor, or didn't know whether they were registered with a local surgery and one in nine found it difficult to reach someone who could treat their asthma through the NHS.

Many were particularly worried about asthma medicines and did not feel able to ask questions of the healthcare professionals that they had come into contact with.

One mother who attended our BME focus group was very confused about her daughter's medicines, saying: 'When she was diagnosed they didn't even tell me how she should take her medicines - it was just "Here it is, take it away and we'll see you in a few years time"... I just wanted them to sit down and say, "This is how it works"... I didn't know if she was taking it right'.

The reasons for poor health-outcomes for BME communities are complex and varied but language barriers and poor access to health services and health information play a key role.

It is important to highlight that even where relatively good asthma control and positive experiences of health services were reported, outcomes were worse than for the general population in almost all cases.

To combat this discrepancy, Asthma UK is highlighting the need for good practice in asthma service delivery to be more widespread and systematic. National standards are essential as a baseline for effective services, but it is equally important that commissioners ensure that local diversity is taken into account when planning asthma services.

It is also vital to make use of more comprehensive ethnicity data recording to identify where the greatest inequalities lie.

An effective way for health professionals to improve outcomes for this group is through the use of written personal asthma action plans. People who do not have such a plan are four times more likely to require emergency hospital treatment than those who do, yet of the respondents to this survey, only around a third said that they had been given one.

Neil Churchill, Chief Executive Asthma UK says: 'The impact that high hospitalisation rates have on BME communities is unjust and unsustainable. We're asking that health decision makers and healthcare professionals ensure that people from these communities are no longer disadvantaged by their asthma services.

'Unnecessary asthma admissions cost the NHS millions of pounds every year and this money could be better spent on providing good asthma care that will keep people out of the emergency rooms.'