South Asian Heritage Month: Celebrating communities and confronting the past for an equitable NHS

South Asian Heritage Month is a celebration of the histories, cultures, and contributions of communities with roots across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives, and Afghanistan. This year’s theme, Unity in Diversity, recognises the richly diverse and distinct identities within South Asian communities, as well as the shared experiences of migration, resilience, and community that connect them.

South Asian communities have long enriched public life across the UK through their contributions to culture, entrepreneurship, education, and public service. For the NHS, generations of South Asian staff, patients, researchers, and community leaders have helped build and sustain the health service we know today. Community-led organisations and faith groups continue to play a vital role in health promotion and advocating for fairer, more inclusive services.

South Asian Heritage Month reminds us, however, that alongside celebration, honouring South Asian communities requires reflection. Understanding the experiences informing South Asian communities’ relationships with institutions, including the NHS, helps us understand how trust is earned and sometimes lost.

Ethnic health inequalities persist for many South Asian communities, with evidence from the King’s Fund demonstrating that Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities experience some of the poorest health outcomes across multiple indicators, including higher rates of cardiovascular disease and diabetes compared with White groups.

For South Asian women, poor experiences of healthcare are often compounded by the intersection of race, gender, culture, and migration. NHS Race & Health Observatory evidence shows how poor communication and a lack of cultural safety across care pathways, including mental health and maternity services, can negatively affect South Asian women’s access, outcomes, and trust in the NHS. Language barriers and unequal power relationships continue to exclude South Asian women from meaningful participation in their own healthcare, as well as in the research underpinning it.

Reflecting on the historic harm experienced by South Asian women gives us important insights into the inequity they face today. The Coventry ‘Radioactive Roti’ experiment provides a stark example outlining the importance of trust, communication, and informed consent. Conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the study involved South Asian women, many recent migrants with limited English, being given chapatis containing radioactive iron as part of research into iron absorption. Later investigations raised concerns about whether participants fully understood and consented to the radiation-based research.

This history is troubling, but important to confront. The Coventry experiment’s significance lies not only in what happened, but in what it teaches us: how communication barriers, assumptions, and institutional power can undermine consent and erode trust. It reminds us that high-quality healthcare depends not only on clinical expertise, but on providers ensuring patients’ autonomy, understanding, and respectful treatment throughout their care.

Remembering Coventry is not about defining South Asian women by harm, but about insisting on better futures. The discomfort of this history sits alongside the resilience and contribution of South Asian communities to the NHS, a legacy on which South Asian Heritage Month encourages us to reflect.

Importantly, the lessons from Coventry and other instances of historic harm have helped shape stronger research ethics, enhanced patient protections, clearer consent standards, and the recognition that South Asian communities must be valued as partners in healthcare. Building on these learnings, national initiatives, including the Health Research Authority’s inclusive research guidance and NHS England’s Healthcare Inequalities Improvement Programme, prioritise culturally responsive communication and targeted action to tackle health inequalities. South Asian Heritage Month is a reminder that learning from the past is essential for equitable healthcare.

These principles sit at the heart of NHS Race & Health Observatory’s mission to proactively identify and tackle the inequities experienced by racially minoritised patients, communities, and healthcare professionals across the health system. We are clear that building equitable healthcare is essential to the future of the NHS.

This requires sustained action across the system, from embedding equitable co-production with communities, to tackling racial bias in NHS datasets. Underpinning this, health system leaders must strive to understand the diverse histories of the patients and communities they serve, as well as the staff providing their care. Most importantly, this requires a genuine commitment to partnership, recognising communities not simply as service users, but as experts in their own experiences.

South Asian Heritage Month provides a timely reminder of what we know should be a year-round priority for the NHS: that through celebrating the contributions of South Asian communities while learning from the lessons of the past, the health system will move one step closer to fulfilling its mission to provide equitable care for all.

The NHS Race & Health Observatory is currently developing a Community Participation and Co-production Toolkit, which will be published at the start of next year. The Toolkit will place co-production at the heart of healthcare, supporting the NHS and the health system to better engage with diverse communities.