Muslims should be given different treatment on the National Health Service to take account of the requirements of their faith, a doctor said on Friday. BritainÂ’s 1.6 million Muslims are twice as likely to report poor health and disability but the NHS keeps no details on patients by religious affinity, according to Edinburgh University primary care professor Aziz Sheikh.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, he said the NHS should record patients’ religion as well as their ethnic grouping. “It is absurd that we do not, for example, know the perinatal mortality or smoking prevalence among Muslims,” he said. Male infant circumcision should be available throughout the NHS, he added. Although some NHS trusts do offer circumcision, most parents are forced into the poorly regulated private sector, he said.
The NHS should be more accommodating to the religious needs of Muslims. Many Muslims would prefer to see a same-sex doctor for reasons of modesty, but this was often not possible, despite the increasing number of female doctors in the NHS. More information about drug ingredients should also be available to allow Muslim patients to avoid porcine and alcohol-derived drugs.
But Aneez Esmail, professor of primary care at Manchester University, said it was not practical for the NHS to meet everyone’s demands for special services. “Going down the path of providing special services for defined groups risks stigmatising and stereotyping,” he wrote in the journal in response to Sheikh’s proposals. “The way forward is not a crude categorisation of people into even more tightly defined groups.” |