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On the day that the UK government, as part of its EU Presidency, hosts a two day Health Inequalities Summit conference in London, a new report claims that health inequalities have deteriorated as a direct result of government policies.
‘Doing better but feeling worse’ is how UK Health Watch 2005 - an 'alternative UK health report' from the Politics of Health Group - describes health in the UK in 2005. ‘Although average life expectancy in the UK continues to increase, the inequalities between rich and poor people, and the problems faced by socially excluded groups, have got steadily worse under New Labour. This is confirmed by the Government’s own statistics’, says Dr Alex Scott-Samuel, joint editor of the report and Joint Chair of the Politics of Health Group.
The report – which is published online and is free to download – presents a wide range of articles on what it calls 'the experience of health in an unequal society'. Some articles are by established experts, like Professors Richard Wilkinson, Peter Townsend, Priscilla Alderson, John Appleby and Dennis Raphael, others by activists like the 'McLibel Two' who came out on top in the recent libel case brought by McDonalds.
An overall theme of the report is the need for the Government to 'refocus upstream' - to go beyond the common focus on diseases and lifestyles, and to address the social and political influences that are responsible for ill-health and inequality. Most of the report’s articles identify economic factors like poverty and income inequality, together with social influences like unequal opportunities and discrimination, as the upstream factors requiring urgent preventive action.
UK Health Watch 2005 doesn't hesitate to offer prescriptions for the many ills it identifies. These range through diverse proposals such as increasing employee ownership of private companies; respecting the human rights of young people; placing sex education in the core national curriculum; and giving more emphasis to expressing emotions and less to displaying aggression in the way we bring up our children.
UK Health Watch 2005 is the UK's contribution to Global Health Watch – an alternative world health report launched by the People's Health Movement in July 2005.
Source: UK Health Watch Report, October 2005
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