Most UK datasets of routinely collected health statistics fail to collect information on ethnicity and religion

The reduction of ethnic inequalities is a long-declared UK government priority,1 but despite the moral and increasingly legal imperative to provide equitable healthcare to all sections of the population, there is very limited evidence of progress in achieving this objective. More recently, New Labour has also committed itself to tackling the very considerable religious inequalities in health and social outcomes that have become evident from analysis of data from the 2001 Census.2 Similar ethnic and religious inequalities in health outcomes almost certainly exist in many other pluralist societies. Given the difficulties in reducing health inequalities for certain disorders, the very considerable gaps remaining in our knowledge in relation to minority communities for many other conditions, and the known under-representation of minority groups in research (both in the UK and US),3,4 it is important that every effort is made to make use of existing data sources to describe and understand the nature of ethnic- and faith-based variations in health outcomes, and assess progress in tackling these inequalities. The UK enjoys some of the foremost datasets of routinely collected health statistics, and greater exploitation of these is potentially of considerable importance to shaping policy, prioritizing research and identifying foci for service delivery improvements. In order to investigate the fitness for purpose of these datasets, we sought to interrogate them for evidence of inclusion of ethnicity and faith variables and, where recorded, to see whether there was a consistent approach to recording that would allow comparisons between datasets.