ABSTRACT
The National Health Service (NHS) has been in a state of flux and transition since 1989 when the government set out to alter drastically the basis of Britain’s healthcare provision (Health Journal, 1989). This chapter is particularly concerned with the government’s focus on black mental health issues, whereby statutory (mental) health service purchasers and providers have been challenged to move away from a service model which provides for an assumed homogeneous (white) population to one which meets the needs of multicultural contemporary British society (Department of Health, 1993a). The establishment of both the Ethnic Health Unit (EHU) and the Regional ‘Race’ Programme (RRP) in 1994 could be seen to signal the government’s active commitment to ‘race’ issues within the NHS. For example, throughout its proposed three-year lifespan, one specific aim of the EHU is to secure greater benefit for black and ‘ethnic’ minority people in England from the NHS (Chan, 1995), whilst the RRP’s remit is to develop national consultative procedures and programmes with representatives of black and/or ‘ethnic’ minority groups (NHS Task Force, 1994a, 1994b).
