Member

For ethnic minorities, it is much worse: 47% of black people who die, and who are of working age, die in poverty. That is a pretty shameful statistic. We know as well that there are language problems: 9% of the population in England and Wales do not have English or Welsh as their first language. That means that the way they receive information to be able to make a decision may be quite distorted. Those of us who have worked with interpreters will be familiar with the situation where you raise a question with an interpreter, the interpreter and the patient have a long conversation and the interpreter comes back with one or two words, and you know that you have missed an enormous amount of important detail.