Improving ethnic monitoring for telephone-based healthcare: a conversation analytic study

Abstract

Medical and healthcare organisations-including the national cancer support and helpline organisation that is the subject of this study-are expected to collect and monitor information about the ethnicity of their client populations. Information about ethnicity is important for a variety of reasons, including monitoring need and targeting healthcare services appropriately. Previous survey and interview research has suggested that collecting ethnicity data from service users can be incomplete and of variable quality-pointing to a need for an improved understanding of the (interactional) difficulties involved when call-handlers ask callers about their ethnicity