Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she plans to take to improve patient data on ethnicity.

NHS England’s Operational Planning Guidance for 2023/24 recognises the importance of improving the completeness of data on patient characteristics. This is one of the five strategic priorities in our drive to reduce healthcare inequalities. NHS England has therefore asked systems to continue to improve the collection and recording of ethnicity data across primary care, outpatients, accident and emergency, mental health, community services, and specialised commissioning. To aid this, NHS England is working to develop tools to support collection of ethnicity information in frontline services.