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Understanding of ethnic disparities in suicide in England and Wales is poor as ethnicity is not recorded on death certificates. Using linked data, we examined variations, by sex, in suicide rates in England and Wales by ethnicity and migrant and descendant status.

It is widely reported that ‘tens of thousands of girls’ are living in the UK with the risk of experiencing Female Genital Cutting or Mutilation (FGC/M). This paper reviews the data on which such claims are based. It finds that the data available with which to establish the scale of such risk is both sparse and problematic, and that the numbers claimed to be at risk are considerably over-inflated. For example, data collected by the National Health Service suggests that as few as eight girls had FGC/M while resident in the UK since their records began, with as few as one or two experiencing FGC/M types 1, 2 or 3. Other data publicly available or retrieved from Freedom of Information requests to the Home Office, Crown Prosecution Service, Ministry of Justice, Department for Education, National Health Service and academic sources also suggest that the ‘tens of thousands of girls’ claim is misplaced. Current UK FGM-safeguarding approaches, though well-intentioned, appear to be based on inaccurate estimates of FGC/M prevalence and risk. Existing research shows that these approaches directly harm communities, contributing to institutional discrimination, racially/religiously-motivated victimisation and the criminalisation of innocent families. This is an issue which must be urgently addressed.

A belief that the hospice philosophy is particularly applicable to younger people may account in part for the continued focus of palliative care on cancer patients, as it has been argued that age is the crucial factor in determining how cancer and non-cancer patients differ. We conducted a secondary analysis of the data from a UK population-based retrospective survey, the Regional Study of Care for the Dying, to critically examine this proposition. The sample comprised 2062 cancer and 1471 non-cancer deaths. On average cancer patients were younger. However, at all ages non-cancer and cancer patients differed significantly with, for example, different patterns of dependency and symptomatology. The cause of death — rather than age — is therefore the principal difference between cancer and non-cancer patients. The debate within palliative care on whether and how to provide services for non-cancer patients must move beyond a focus on group differences such as age between these and cancer patients and focus instead on understanding the varying problems non-cancer patients experience, and addressing how best to organize palliative care services to meet the individual needs of these patients.