Bringing leaders together on racialised health inequalities

We were honoured to recently host a visit from Prof Habib Naqvi MBE, Chief Executive of the NHS Race and Health Observatory, as part of his tour of Scotland to meet with organisations and stakeholders working to tackle health inequities.

The meeting brought together colleagues from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, the Scottish Government, Public Health Scotland, the Anti Racism Observatory for Scotland (AROS), Glasgow Centre for Population Health, and Heriot-Watt University — including meeting convenor, Manira Ahmad (PHS), Sir Gregor Smith (Chief Medical Officer for Scotland), and AROS co-CEO’s Benaifer Bhandari and Dr Jonathan Yahya Williams.

We shared Amma’s work and the experiences of the women we support, and had a rich and wide-ranging conversation about racialised health inequalities in maternity care, including the persistent disparities in outcomes, the structural barriers women from migrant and racialised backgrounds face, and what meaningful, community-led responses to those inequalities can look like.

Prof Naqvi reflected on the visit, describing Amma as a model for scale and spread, and noting that it is not just the content of what we do, but how we do it, that offers learning for achieving equitable maternity care pathways and co-production approaches.