Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many NHS services allow patients to identify as (a) Sikh under ethnicity questions and (b) Sikhism as their religion.

The merits of including Jewish or Sikh as an option when recording ethnicity in National Health Service data, and other issues relating to how the NHS records information on protected characteristics, are being considered by the Unified Information Standard for Protected Characteristics programme. This programme will help inform a view on next steps.

Information is not held centrally on the number of NHS services which allow patients to identify as Jewish or Sikh under ethnicity questions, or to record Judaism or Sikhism as their religion. There are SNOMED CT codes, the terminology used for recording patient information consistently across the NHS, for Judaism and Sikhism under religion.