Reducing Health inequalities and enabling self care for all

The NHS Race and Health observatory recently highlighted ethnic inequalities in the UK. Examples included that 24% of all deaths in England and Wales in 2019 that were caused by cardio vascular disease were in black and ethnic groups. Also South Asians have a 40% higher death rate from CHD than the general population, and south Asian and black people are 2-4\* more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than white people.

People of British Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) origin are at a higher likelihood of testing positive and dying with COVID-19\.

A report from Public Health England stated that an analysis of survival among confirmed COVID-19 cases showed that, after accounting for the effect of sex, age, deprivation and region, people of Bangladeshi ethnicity had around twice the risk of death when compared to 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 when compared to White British.

In order to move forward, the report and experts made a number of recommendations to meet the challenge that this provided to the UK. In particular one of the recommendations ( recommendation 5 ) stated that was to develop and implement culturally competent COVID-19 education and prevention campaigns. Another key recommendation was to ( recommendation 6 ) Accelerate efforts to target culturally competent health promotion and disease prevention programmes for non-communicable diseases promoting healthy weight, physical activity, smoking cessation, mental wellbeing and effective management of chronic conditions including diabetes, hypertension and asthma.

With support from Innovate UK, Health Fabric has created a new platform called 'Unity' to fulfil these recommendations. Innovate Project '89932: AI enabled self-management to address health inequalities' has enabled us to create a new AI based new self-management platform, that meets the unmet need of BAME communities to self-manage their long-term conditions.

The platform allows all service users, including people of BAME origin to manage their long-term conditions in multiple languages with the Unity App which was tested in a single GP Practice.

The purpose of this application is to scale this initial work across an local authority to enable self-care and new models of care for independent living for 1000's of citizens, across multicultural communities to manage existing conditions and improve health and wellbeing through preventative health, and enhance the clinical service provided by the GP implementation.