Throughout this book, it has been argued that we need to think differently about the terms we employ when doing inclusive practice in health and health-related research. In this book, the terms ‘BME’ and ‘ethnic minority groups’ have referred to any other ethnic grouping apart from white British. The terms and typologies we use to identify and classify people from different ethnic backgrounds and racial groups impact on how these groups are understood and interpreted by others. Importantly, we need to avoid use of the term ‘hard to reach’, because it problematises BME and ethnic minority groups and assumes that they are solely responsible for their health and healthcare access.

As we have seen, terms such as this can be utilised by dominant and majority groups to legitimise hierarchies and to maintain segregation, marginalisation and discrimination towards minorities. Recognition of this is important, because research in this field, and presented here, acknowledges that people from different ethnic backgrounds and racial groups are still being treated differently by health service providers and feel unequal to White British groups (Salway et al, 2016; Race Disparity Unit, 2019a). Furthermore, perceived discrimination among minority groups is relatively high in healthcare settings and can lead to them forgoing healthcare (Rivenbark and Ichou, 2020).

The research presented in this book – and specifically in Chapters 5, 6 and 7 – has shown that BME groups are not hard to reach, but rather we need to do more to improve the way in which we design and deliver services for them and complete research with or about them. Specifically, we need to improve the methods and practices we utilise to understand their health and healthcare access and the factors that impact on these.

This book has also shown that there is a paucity of national public health resources that examine health inequalities and its causes. There are also significant problems in the recording and monitoring of ethnicity and its classifications, which contributes to an invisibility of ethnic minority groups in health research and public health data. Notably, in Chapter 1 it was demonstrated that the meaning of race and ethnicity is often misunderstood and conflated, and there are diverse variations in the concepts used to define ethnic minorities. BME group categories are also often applied homogeneously and generalised across diverse groups.