14 hours ago
No WiFi is 'health barrier' for Cumbrian ethnic minorities
A lack of wi-fi to use translate services to access basic health care services is one of the major barriers affecting ethnic minority communities in north and west Cumbria, according to a new Faisal Solkar told Cumberland Council's health and wellbeing board that "language barriers and trust issues" has lead to an overuse of accident and emergency among ethic minority Health Needs Assessment: Ethnic Minorities 2025 report also listed perception of care, navigation and awareness issues, service availability and service accessibility as other barriers. Dr Solkar, who carried out the research, said: "Language remains a significant barrier in health care."
The report also stated the maternal mortality rate in black and mixed ethnicity groups was three times higher than in white communities.
The five core recommendations in the report were:
Improve communication and information accessExpand interpretation servicesRequire ethnicity data collection across all health and social care settingsIncrease access to preventative careAdopt patient-centred approachesIn addition, there were three supporting recommendations which were to introduce multi-lingual booking systems, provide digital access support and strengthen community engagement, the Local Democracy Reporting Service response to language barriers, Colin Cox, the council's director of public health, customer and community wellbeing, said the latest generation of iPhones had simultaneous translation apps."We've got that technology available to us and we've got to be investing in it," he Elaine Lynch suggested a pilot scheme could be introduced at a Carlisle medical practice to help tackle language noted the report and agreed the communication and translation pilot should be explored further.
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