Health Inequalities in Newham

In Newham, many people have poor health outcomes due to poverty and deprivation. About 75% of Newham's residents live in the most deprived 30% of areas in the UK. Nearly 70% of our residents are from the global majority, making Newham one of the most diverse areas in the UK. Within Newham it’s therefore essential to tackle health inequalities with an anti-racist and anti-poverty approach, considering all protected characteristics.

The 2024 report ‘Structural Racism, Ethnicity and Health Inequalities in London’ evidences how racism harms physical and mental health and how it can cause socio-economic disadvantages. Structural racism in health and care services also affects health inequalities, impacting access and quality of care. Other factors like disability, age, faith, gender, and how long someone has lived in the UK can add to the effects of racism on health. This means that an intersectional approach is essential to reduce health inequalities.

Our Health Equity Programme works in partnership with Health, Voluntary, Community, and Faith Organisations in the borough to embed positive changes within services and reduce issues that contribute to unfair and unequal health outcomes.

We are gathering a repository of data to help organisations better understand our population and the specific health challenges in Newham. Knowing who lives in the area can help us ensure our services reach the right residents. 

Our Health Equity toolkit can support you to go through the following journey:

Newham Health Equity Programme (2024)

To better understand health inequalities we need to create a consistent baseline for ethnicity data collection in Newham. This will enable you to use our ‘Does it Look Like Newham? (DILLN)’ tool in the Health Equity toolkit, to compare service attendees to Newham’s population. To support better data collection we have created a guide to using ONS 18+1 which you can view here with an example of how this has supported the Adult Safeguarding Board to better understand health inequalities in their service.

ONS have created a detailed example of the recommended ethnic group question for use in surveys that you can directly follow to collect ethnicity data. You can view the full guidance page here

We aim to create a one-stop shop for understanding our population and residents' needs in Newham. 

If you have any data or resources to share, please submit them to us at healthequity@newham.gov.uk

Below are resources that you can use: