‘Count Me In’, the first national mental health ethnicity census, is set to take place on March 31st 2005. The census is part of a national programme aiming to improve services for people with a mental illness and their carers from black and minority ethnic communities.
All NHS provider Trusts and private and voluntary providers registered as mental health establishments with either the Care Services Inspectorate for Wales or the Healthcare Commission (England) will collect the census data. The census will gather information from approximately 38,000 service users to determine the ethnicity of all inpatients; in the process it aims to encourage accurate and comprehensive ethnic monitoring and record keeping, and to examine the extent to which this information is used by providers.
The joint project is led by the Mental Health Act Commission and involves the Healthcare Commission and the National Institute for Mental Health in England. The results of this census will be published this autumn.
For more information on the census, visit:
www.mhac.org.uk/census/