Webinar: Ethnic and Religious Differences in the Healthcare Use of Children Receiving Care and Support in Wales

Abstract

Children receiving care and support (CRCS) from the child welfare system represent a vulnerable subpopulation who often face complex and multifaceted challenges, usually stemming from abuse, neglect, or disability. Despite the significant health disparities associated with this group, limited research has explored how these outcomes differ across ethnic and religious identities.

This paper addresses this gap by examining ethnic and religious differences in healthcare utilisation among CRCS children using comprehensive linked administrative data from Wales. We linked CRCS records from 2017 to 2019 with the 2011 and 2021 Office for National Statistics Census data to identify the child’s religious affiliation and improve ethnicity completeness. Additionally, we integrated these records with primary and secondary care health data for the corresponding years.

Leveraging these innovative data linkages, we assessed ethnic and religious variations in two key areas: (1) the likelihood of accessing different healthcare services (General Practitioner [GP], hospital inpatient care, and Accident & Emergency [A&E]) and (2) the probability of using healthcare for common conditions, like mental health issues and injuries.

Biography

Yongchao is now a Research Associate on the Health and Care Research Wales (HCRW) funded project Ethnic and Religious Inequalities in Children Welfare (ERICA) exploring ethnic inequality in children’s social care by applying complex data linkage techniques with administrative data in Wales within SAIL databank. She has published with the ERICA research team on ethnic disproportionality in the child welfare system (https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcae117) and a pre-print on ethnic inequality in educational outcomes for children receiving social care (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/cwyr7_v1).