Agenda and minutes

Councillor Wallace Redford nominated Councillor Clare Golby to chair the meeting. This was seconded by Councillor John Cooke.

There were no other nominations.

Resolved

That Councillor Clare Golby is appointed Chair of the Joint Communities and Adult Social Care & Health OSC.

The Chair reminded the committee that this Joint OSC meeting was requested following the approval of a motion during the County Council meeting in September 2020, which focused on the needs of the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities. Given the broad spectrum of issues which could be raised she asked members to focus their questions to be pertinent to the scope of the item.

Councillors Sally Bragg – Rugby Borough Council, Jeff Clarke, Dave Shilton and Andrew Wright

Dr Shade Agboola (Director of Public Health) and Catherine Shuttleworth (Public Health Principal) who was substituted by Aoife Barror (Public Health Registrar)

None.

None.

None.

Mark Ryder, Strategic Director for Communities introduced this item, outlining the four topics that would be covered during the meeting. Each would be delivered by a presentation with the opportunity for members’ questions and discussion on next steps. The work was split into three sections:

• ‘Make sense’ – to give members an opportunity to consider the position of EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) in terms of education, health, economy and organisation.
• ‘Make relevant’ – to give members an update on the latest activity in Warwickshire.
• ‘Make happen’ – to enable members to decide what next steps should be taken.

Mark Ryder provided context on the demographic data for Warwickshire from the 2016 census.  He added that amongst younger age groups there was a higher percentage of ethnic diversity, which indicated a change in demography and that policies needed to be adapted. Inequalities had been brought into sharp focus through the UK’s exit from the EU, the impact of Covid-19, exposing pre-existing inequalities and the growing needs of BAME communities in terms of equality of access to services, future opportunities and outcomes. He reminded members of the Council’s EDI vision agreed in August 2020 and the aims for the County Council to be a place where everyone felt valued, included, safe, supported and welcome. There were specific strands for employees, communities and members. Mark Ryder stated that all communities should feel comfortable contacting the council’s services and members should feel supported by the council too as well as be aware of the EDI Action Plan. The introduction was followed by four thematic presentations.

Health

Dr Gordana Djuric (Consultant Health Improvement Commissioning and Performance) presented the health aspect and raised the following points, initially on the evidence base and intelligence:

• Addressing health inequalities remained a big part of Public Health England’s (PHE) work. This included the BAME communities and the impact of Covid-19.
• People of BAME groups were more likely to contract and die from Covid-19.
• People of Bangladeshi ethnicity had around twice the risk of death than people of White British ethnicity. People of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Other Asian, Caribbean and Other Black ethnicity had between 10 and 50% higher risk of death compared to White British.
• This analysis did not account for the effect of occupation, comorbidities or obesity, which were important factors associated with the risk of acquiring or dying from Covid-19. Other evidence showed that when comorbidities were included, the difference in the risk of death among hospitalised patients was greatly reduced.
• The report made seven recommendations for implementation, including “support community participatory research to understand the wider determinants of Covid-19 in BAME communities, and to develop readily implementable and scalable programmes to reduce risk and improve health outcomes”.
• In October the ONS (Office of National Statistics) conducted further analysis which included looking at whether pre-existing health conditions could explain the differences between ethnicities. This analysis found:

·       When adjusting for age, rates of death involving Covid-19 remained greater for most ethnic minority groups, and most notably so for  ...  view the full minutes text for item 4.