Referral patterns for post-acute inpatient brain injury rehabilitation in England: Who are the minorities?

Belonging to a minority ethnic background affects access to health and social care services. The sparse research available has been one of the factors limiting our understanding of this problem. Within the UK, there appear to be no published data around referral patterns of ethnic minority groups for inpatient neurorehabilitation following a brain injury. This study used Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to obtain data around rehabilitation referral patterns across England. Of the 42 Integrated Care Boards (ICB) approached, 35 responded. Data on ethnicity of the population served was provided in 30 (71%) cases. Information on referrals to inpatient neurorehabilitation was provided by 23 (66%) of the respondents, but a breakdown of the ethnicity of the referrals was only available for seven ICB's (30%), and the largest category of ethnicity on record was "unknown", or "undeclared." There are barriers to the capture and reporting of ethnic information, particularly for minority groups, but uncertainty as to whether this stems from patients' choice or reluctance in disclosing this, or from the minimum data capture requirements within services, or both. The absence of these data prevents the development of improvement strategies to audit and mitigate drivers of inequality.