The Ten Essential Shared Capabilities

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• Race equality and cultural capability
  • 1. How BME service users have experienced mental health services
  • 2. Key factors from this overall experience
  • 3. Defining race and culture
  • 4. Breaking the Circles of Fear
  • 5. An organisational focus on change
  • 6. A holistic approach as the key to assessment
  • 7. Delivering race equality
  • 8. Links to further learning
  • 9. Definitions
  • 10. Legal Context - Race

2. Looking at some key factors from the BME experience

Having looked generally at the experience of BME service users, we will explore some key factors in more detail in this part of the module.

There have been concerns about the delivery of mental health services to BME communities in the UK for many years. The first studies were concerned with African Caribbean people in the early 1960s. They ranged from those concerned with the effects of immigration, to others that compared the prevalence of schizophrenia and sought to demonstrate ethnic differences. Over time, these studies widened to include other ethnic groups, including Irish and Asian people, which in the latter case, also showed wide variations in prevalence and incidence. However, within the clinical literature, a major focus in terms of ethnicity has been upon African Caribbean people.