In two case studies, researchers at Cambridge Public Health and the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration highlight examples of how care systems in the East of England overcame identified obstacles to improving the quality of their data that relate to health inequalities.
The changes these systems introduced suggest that, despite known barriers to data quality improvement, practices such as data linkage and a team-wide focus on capturing ethnicity information can support anyone working in the health and care sector whose work deals with data to effectively combat health inequality — down to the individual level.
The researchers conducted this work consulting with Integrated Care Services in the East of England and with Health Innovation East.