In this issue of Informatics in Primary Care: ethnicity, learning and diabetes

Abstract

The quality of routinely collected data in UK primary care is high and provides great opportunities for research and quality improvement. Its strengths and weaknesses are well known, and extensively described within the pages of this journal and elsewhere. Recording of ethnicity data has been a relatively recent addition to routine coding; but good progress has been made particularly in some inner-city areas. This allows routinely collecteddata tobeused tohelpdescribe ethnic differences in disease management and ensure equity in service provision, in a way that would not have previously been possible. This is despite complex and overlapping hierarchies for data recording. The study by Hull et al, is important because it suggest that there is now better agreement betweenGP and hospital ethnicity data than with census data. This finding if repeated more widely suggests that there may be a greater role for GP data than suggested in the Department of Health’s Equity Rights Group editorial. The quality of census data unsurprisingly falls as it gets older – we are now eight years since the last census (2001) – however, this will inevitably be repeated with each 10 yearly cycle of data collection. However, GP data will perhaps better reflect the inevitable and repeated waves ofmigration andmovement that take place across this country. Using technology for learning