Your article on health inequality (Britain’s ‘medieval’ health inequality is devastating NHS, experts say, 29 June) describes the laudable efforts of NHS agencies to tackle some of the acute health problems in poorer areas. However, the real problem is that the reason we have such disparities in health is that they are directly related to the gross disparities in wealth and income in this country.
As Prof Michael Marmot and many others have demonstrated, some of the most important factors in determining health are social and economic. It is all very well for the NHS to make efforts to actively address the effects of social and economic deprivation in poor areas, but this is managing symptoms rather than the cause.
