Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T18:29:56.858Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Tackling Inequalities in Health in England: Remedying Health Disadvantages, Narrowing Health Gaps or Reducing Health Gradients?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2004

HILARY GRAHAM
Affiliation:
Institute for Health Research, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YT. email: h.m.graham@lancaster.ac.uk

Abstract

Socioeconomic inequalities in health have moved up the policy agenda of older industrial societies. The paper turns the spotlight on this development by exploring how the goal has been represented in England's national policy documents. Rather than one approach, there appears to be a range of understandings of what it means to tackle health inequalities. These understandings can be placed on a continuum, which runs from improving the health of poor groups, through closing the health gaps between those in the poorest circumstances and better-off groups, to addressing the association between socioeconomic position and health across the population. The paper points to common ground between the three approaches to tackling health inequalities, but also to important differences in the moral arguments and causal models on which they rest, and therefore in their policy goals and anticipated policy impacts.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)