Why has a new Ethnic categories hierarchy been added to the January 2004 release of Clinical Terms (the Read codes)?
An Ethnic Monitoring in Primary Care Conference held in May 2003, organised by the London (NHS) Race Equality Group, identified a need to establish a definitive and discrete set of Read Codes to support ethnicity monitoring. The conference was attended by about 80 people representing primary care trusts, general practitioners, and community health practitioners. Consequent to the conference the London Health Observatory (http://www.lho.org.uk), which has a national lead role for health inequalities, regeneration and social exclusion, and the NHSIA have worked together to satisfy the requirements of current legislation such as the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 and to address the issues raised by the Conference. In the Fourbyte and Version 2 Read codes a new hierarchy of ethnic categories headed by 9i… Ethnic category – 2001 census, based on the 2001 Census Output Classifications and Glossary, has been created. The codes at third character level in this hierarchy correspond to th
