Minority ethnic and religious group experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic

In this section you will find a ‘catalyst films’ we have created for use in service improvement projects, including experience-based co-design and experience-led commissioning. Catalyst films are designed to be used as part of a facilitated quality improvement process; their purpose is to get local people, patients, families and NHS staff talking together about how they can jointly improve people’s experience.

This film explores the experiences of people from ethnic and religious minorities during the Covid-19 pandemic, drawn from a study into diverse experiences of Covid-19 in the community. 

If you plan to show this film, we suggest the person facilitating the session use the following introduction to set the scene.

This film was put together from analysis of 70 interviews that are part of a national sample of people talking about their experiences of Covid-19 in the UK.   Researchers at the University of Oxford collected interviews with people all round the country, many on video, some audio or written only. They present findings from these interviews on the patient information website HEXI. The interviews are not just about NHS care but also much wider experiences for example the impact that a particular health condition has had on their family, work and social lives. 
    
For this project, we looked again at the whole interview collection and this time pulled out specific themes around experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic among people from ethnic and religious minority groups. 

Obviously these are not people from your local area and everybody has a different experience, though some patterns do start to emerge from looking at many stories. Some of the things they say you may think aren't relevant to local services or what happened to you. But our hope is that listening to them will help you reflect on your own memories and spark some ideas for what could be done differently here. 

There may be some where people are frustrated or angry, because of the distress they have experienced. You will hear some negative comments, because we can learn a lot from looking at when things went wrong and what could have been done to make that a better experience. Even when people are largely positive about the rest of their care, one damaging bad moment can colour the whole thing. But listen out for positive comments too, where people remember some small act of kindness or a particularly good moment that made all the difference to them. 

This project is funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council – grant reference ES/V016032/1. It is a collaboration between the Medical Sociology and Health Experiences Research Group at the University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, the Open University, the Institute for Social Marketing and Health at the University of Stirling, the University of Aberdeen and THIS Institute at the University of Cambridge. 

The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the NHS, the NIHR, or the Department of Health.