Government's Approaches to Addressing Health Inequalities in the UK

Contemporary Debates

Table of Contents
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
Health inequalities are major concern in the UK. Discuss the government's approaches to
addressing these inequalities.......................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................8
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................9

INTRODUCTION
Health inequalities are defined as the differences that occurs in the health of people. This
term is used to describe differences that people receive in their care and opportunities that they
have to live a healthy life. Both these factors could contribute to the health status of people such
as life expectancy and prevalence of health situations (Paavola, 2017). In UK health inequalities
is one of the major concern which the government has to pay its focus and take various measure
to minimize its impact. The following essay discuss about what is health inequalities and how the
government of UK is responding towards this issue.
MAIN BODY
Health inequalities are major concern in the UK. Discuss the government's approaches to
addressing these inequalities
Health inequalities are defined as unfair, avoidable and systematic differences that people of
different group experience in their life. Health inequalities could include various differences such
as health status, access to care, quality and experience of care, broad determinants of health and
behavioural risk to health. In England these health inequalities are defined through four factors
that involve socio-economic, geography, socially excluded groups and certain characteristics
such as sex, disability and ethnicity. People of the country experience several combination of
these components which has execution for health inequalities (Ng and Evans, 2021). It has also
been observed that people experience interaction between these components. For instance,
people with specific characteristic could experience health inequalities related to socio-economic
status and health. Life expectancy plays a very crucial role in health status of population and
inequality related to this factor is the foremost measure. Life expectancy is very much related to
socio-economic situations of people and the most common measure of these circumstances is
deprivation. The index of multiple deprivation is used to describe how deprived people are
within an area which are based on various factors such as employment, income and education. In
UK, there is a systematic relationship between life expectancy and deprivation which is called as
social gradient in health. It has been estimated that males who are living in less deprived areas
are expected to live almost 9.4 years longer as compare to males who lives in most deprived
areas (Marmot, 2020).