“Health inequalities are avoidable, unfair and systematic differences in health between different groups of people”.
What this means locally is that we know that how long you live for or at what age you develop serious health conditions such as a heart attack is impacted on as much by your postcode, your job and housing as much as the health support you get from the NHS.
These health inequalities are caused by a wide range of factors such as access to healthcare, ethnicity, geography (postcode) and wider social determinants such as income, job security, housing, environment, transport, education and work.
Tackling these inequalities is challenging and is the reason we are trying to think and do things differently. We need to work together across all organisations to move away from an individual approach to a population and system approach.
For more info – Health inequalities in a nutshell
