Nearly twenty years after the ground-breaking report by Brent Community Health Council
(CHC) (1981) into the standard of health care provided to minority ethnic communities,
there is continuing evidence of failure on the part of the National Health Service (NHS).
One of the ways in which the New Labour government has sought to address such
inadequacies in public services has been to increase the numbers of minority ethnic
people in the workforce. The central argument of this thesis is that the notion of 'ethnic
diversity' has not been adequately defined, and that the practical implications of diversity
may be the creation of new'ethnic specialisms' and the consequent marginalisation of
minority ethnic individuals. The means by which the government are seeking to achieve
ethnic diversity, i. e. mainstreaming 'race' equality issues and using strong positive action
(PA), have no tradition in the NHS and are likely to be resisted. Even those who might be
considered natural allies of the government, personnel and human resources
professionals, undermined to some extent by new public management, may prove
obstructive. They appear to have developed a fairly new equality practice, managing
diversity (and in particular the model promoted by Kandola eta! 1995; Kandola & Fullerton
1998) to overcome their relative loss of influence. This is an individualistic tool wholly
antithetical to the use of PA, which works on the basis of group identities. The research
findings presented here are drawn from a national mail survey of NHS trusts, and a semistructured
interview survey carried out with various actors involved in minority ethnic
health issues in a major city in the south west of England. Its primary contribution is to
conceptualise explicitly the notion of ethnic diversity, establishing its practical implications,
and testing empirically the possibility of redefining the merit principle to include group
identities