NOT enough people from ethnic minorities work in community-based NHS services in Blackburn with Darwen, an NHS boss said today.

Paul Hinnigan, acting chief executive of Blackburn with Darwen NHS Primary Care Trust, said more staff should be recruited into key roles such as district nurses to reflect the borough's community.

He was speaking at the launch of the PCTs first ever action plan designed to attract more people from ethnic communities and to improve services for minority groups.

The PCT estimates just one in 10 employees are from the ethnic minority community.

He said: "We know we can only meet our aims if we recruit and retain a workforce which is similar in make-up to the community it serves. A lot of the action in the action plan is about attracting people from a wide variety of backgrounds to come and work for us."

He added: "The action plan will help us focus more clearly on helping people with chronic diseases where morbidity is high among people from ethnic communities and on health inequalities, where ethnic minority communities are often disadvantaged."

People are now being asked what they think of the document, which is available on the PCTs website and by calling the authority.

Among the actions, it calls for targets to be set to recruit people from "under-represented groups" and for a survey of patients' views.It also says translation services have to be looked at to identify "significant gaps". Yet Janaid Qureshi, senior executive officer at the Blackburn-based Ethnic Minorities Development Association, said: "The action plan is a very positive step but there needs to be more meat on it. It has to offer meaningful targets.

"They should say we would like to see 20 per cent improvement on this' because at the moment it is very generic."

Mr Qureshi, a non-executive member of Cumbria and Lancashire NHS Strategic Health Authority, which oversees healthcare, added: "They should say we need the number of ethnic minorities to go up by X per cent.

"Only time will tell whether this action plan is a meaningful effort."

The action plan is available by calling Shahida Hanif on 01254 267059 or by visiting www.bwdpct.nhs.uk.