Monitoring racialised health inequalities in Scotland
Data and evidence

About this release

This is Public Health Scotland’s second report on monitoring racialised health inequalities in Scotland. It provides information on ongoing improvements in ethnicity data collection and analysis to allow routine monitoring of racialised health inequalities across the health and care system. This year's report:

• Focuses on ongoing work within maternity and early years data. This reflects both the importance of public health advice and interventions during maternity and early years in improving the health of the population and the progress being made in capturing ethnicity information in these key areas.
• Updates on an evaluation of the COVID-19 vaccination programme, looking at factors affecting vaccine uptake among different ethnic groups and the lessons learned to improve uptake in future vaccination programmes.
• Updates on work to refresh the 'Happy to ask, happy to tell' toolkit which seeks to empower health and care professionals to ask data providers about their equality characteristics, including ethnicity.
• Describes work to address the significant health inequalities experienced by the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community.
• Shows that progress is being made on improving the availability of ethnicity data for monitoring racialised health inequalities but there is still more to do.

Public Health Scotland is committed to publishing more data which meets the needs of policymakers, service providers, and the patients and communities they serve in order to monitor and reduce racialised health inequalities.

Public Health Scotland will continue to work with the Scottish Government and other partners to tackle the health inequalities that people from minority ethnic backgrounds face. This will include working in partnership to deliver the actions set out in Scotland's Equality Evidence Strategy 2023–2025 and the Data Strategy for Health and Social Care.