Health Equity and Minority Ethnic Health 

The cross cutting Health Equity and Minority Ethnic Health topic estimates the impact of interventions on health inequalities and develops strategies to minimise inequity in access and outcomes.  It seeks to enhance access to services and reduce inequalities in outcomes for ethnic minority families.

Health Equity and Minority Ethnic Health projects include: 

BIRU - Bradford Inequalities Research Unit

The BIRU is commissioned by Bradford District and Craven Clinical Commissioning Group to support a programme of interventions that aim to Reduce Inequalities in Communities (RIC)

The BIRU takes a data driven approach to identify the drivers that underpin health inequalities in the central locality of Bradford and inform interventions to tackle these inequalities.


The BIRU will also provide evaluations of some key interventions:

·       Continuity of Midwifery Care

·       CLICS

·       Proactive Care Team

·       Admiral Nurses (dementia)

·       Welfare Benefits Advice


The BIRU also leads a community readiness research project that aims to understand how ‘ready’ the community are to address some key issues including:

·   End of Life Care

·   Cancer Screening

·   Management of long-term conditions

·   Flu and COVID-19 Vaccine uptake

 For more information visit the Born in Bradford's subpage about Bradford's research on inequalities here

If you have any questions about this project please reach out to:

Josie Dickerson, project lead - Josie.Dickerson@bthft.nhs.uk  

Making perinatal mental health care easy to access for everyone

The West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership (WYHHCP) Perinatal Mental Health  steering group has funded research to identify the reasons for inequalities in the identification and treatment of perinatal mental health across the different perinatal services in West Yorkshire and Harrogate. This work will enable services and commissioners to co-produce recommendations and adaptations to systems to address these inequalities and provide the best possible level of care to women, their partners and children.

Work being undertaken includes:

If you have any questions about this project please reach out to:

Josie Dickerson, project lead - Josie.Dickerson@bthft.nhs.uk

Mental Health Navigators - Evaluation

Mental health problems disproportionately affect people living in deprived circumstances and can cause significant impairment. Maintaining a tenancy during mental health challenges is difficult but few people with even severe mental illness live in supported housing; most rent their home. Housing support officers have few resources to deal with mental health-related tenancy problems, which can quickly escalate to clinical crisis, or terminated tenancies.

This project will evaluate a Mental Health Navigator (MHN) designed and delivered by Wakefield District Housing (WDH) and Wakefield Clinical Commissioning Group. The scheme supports people with mental health problems to maintain tenancies and prevent secondary mental health care referrals. Navigators, employed by the local mental health trust, work with WDH to provide practical support and early intervention to tenants experiencing problems.

We aim to conduct robust, theory informed, evaluation of the existing site (Wakefield), whilst exploring potential barriers and facilitators to adoption in novel settings, using that evidence to inform an implementation toolkit to support roll-out in other sites regionally and nationally. We will conduct an evaluation that informs implementation with three key objectives:

1) assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the scheme; 

2) explore existing and future service user, provider and stakeholder views of the acceptability and feasibility of the initiative; 

3) synthesise findings and ‘lessons learned’ to develop an implementation toolkit. 

If you have any questions about this project please reach out to:

Sarah Blower, project lead - Sarah.Blower@york.ac.uk

Jointly funded by Yorkshire & Humber ARC and NIHR School for Public Health Research, this project will investigate inequalities in care for women at high risk of developing severe perinatal mental illness. Routine health data will be used to assess disparities in access to services for women from minority ethnic groups and women living in poverty. Interviews with women from these backgrounds will also be undertaken to understand their experiences of being labelled ‘high risk’.

If you have any questions about this project please reach out to:

Carli Colegate - ccolegate1@sheffield.ac.uk

PhD: Maximising the detection of postnatal depression in Pakistani Muslim women

The BiBBS cohort was used to understand how Pakistani-Muslim women experience motherhood during the postnatal period, including their knowledge, experience and understanding of psychological distress after childbirth.

If you have any questions about this project please reach out to:

Amirah Akhtar - a.akhtar34@student.bradford.ac.uk

PhD: Observation of the variety of engagement and use of early years pathways by different ethnic groups

The project will use the BiBBS dataset to investigate engagement with the Better Start Bradford early years interventions, using a variety of statistical methods. Analysis will include socio-demographic and lifestyle factors linked to uptake and completion, as well as project characteristics.

If you have any questions about this project please visit:

https://www.york.ac.uk/healthsciences/our-staff/jennie-lister/

PhD: Developing effective maternity services for refugee and asylum seeking women with symptoms of perinatal depression. Increasing the visibility of an invisible population. 

This is a qualitative doctoral project looking at how maternity services in England can be developed to be more effective at recognising and supporting refugee and asylum seeking women with symptoms of perinatal depression. Interviews have been completed with 14 midwives and 20 refugee and asylum seeking women across England, exploring how midwives can better recognise and support women and also the barriers/ facilitators to doing this within the current maternity system. 

If you have any questions about this project please reach out to:

Amanda Firth - a.d.firth@hud.ac.uk

For more information about the topic reach out to: 

Stephanie Prady, Health Equity lead

Josie Dickerson, Minority Ethnic Health lead - Josie.Dickerson@bthft.nhs.uk