Serving the South Asian population:

patient support and clinical research

in Birmingham

09/01/09: By Kanta Kumar, Clinical Research Nurse, Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospital NHS Trust

Taken from NRAS magazine, Winter 2008

One of the largest ethnic minority groups in the UK comes from the Indian subcontinent and the rheumatology department at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust serves a large number of patients with this background. The Rheumatology team at this unit has been focusing on the impact of ethnicity on health beliefs in relation to musculoskeletal disease with the aim of improving the journey of patients of South Asian origin through musculoskeletal care.

In a recent survey from this unit, 34% of patients stated that they required translation services to communicate effectively with an English speaking health care professional; in more than 90% of these cases the patients spoke a South Asian language. To provide a communication channel for such patients the unit has successfully established an Asian language telephone helpline. The aim is to facilitate a process through which these patients can play a more active role in the management of their disease. The survey also highlighted that a significant proportion of patients who required translation services could not read the script of the language they could speak.

In light of these findings, the group is setting up a study in collaboration with the Birmingham Arthritis Resource Centre (BARC) to investigate whether offering an audio CD (in Urdu, Punjabi and Hindi) on different rheumatic diseases and their management would be a useful way of delivering information to patients who cannot read English or the script of their spoken language.

Further work led by Kanta Kumar has identified that patients with RA from a South Asian background have different beliefs about medicines compared with patients of white British origin. Patients in both groups considered the medicines that they took to control their RA to be necessary. However, patients from a South Asian background viewed medicines as being harmful and overused. To investigate this further, Kanta has conducted a qualitative study using focus groups of patients of South Asian origin. Her study has provided insight into why patients from a South Asian background hold negative beliefs about medicines. The results suggest that patients’ understanding of the cause of their disease and the reasons for its persistence have a large impact on their views about whether medicines are harmful and overused.