Health Disparities In Health: A Case Study

This essay explores the relationship of socioeconomic impacts on health in Islington Borough and accumulate data about disparities in the provision of health and social care services. I will also examine government methods in the promotion of health and factors and how barriers affect these health promotion campaigns.

Health promotion is the procedure of empowering individuals to build control over, and to enhance, their Health. It moves past an emphasis on individual conduct towards an extensive variety of social and environmental interventions. The Ottawa Charter (1986) defines health promotion as the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve their health to reach a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing

A key contribution of the Black report was the specification of different potential explanations for health inequalities. The importance of reporting is to bring out behavioural factors that can be discussed with as well as the economic and social constraints on lifestyles being recognised with appropriate measures taken. The effect of low income makes it meaningless to consider diet a matter solely of choice. Similarly, smoking can compensate for and make bearable the consequences of material deprivation which can then be properly investigated (WHO, 2007).

The Marmot Review 2010 involves the strategies for reducing health inequalities in England in relation to Global Commission on Social Determinants of Health (GCDH) and this report indicated that people who are at the lower level of socio-economic factors such as unemployed, unskilled workers, people that living in overcrowded housing, homeless people and people with limited education might find it difficult to access healthcare needs because they will always need to rely on welfare state benefits and support to survive (Goldberg, et al.

It shows that as we move from social class 1 to social class V, there is increased risk of variety of diseases like cancer, respiratory, heart, strokes etc. and also the chance of accidents and suicides also increase in the lower classes (Waterson, 2003). It states that poor men and women are more likely to die than rich ones. Thus mortality is also proportional to the social class that an individual belongs to. Socioeconomic inequalities in health typically take the form of a ‘social gradient’, in which those in higher socioeconomic groups have better health and longer life expectancy than the groups below them (Scambler, 2008).

Hence, health inequalities are evident from the start of life. For example, there are gradients in birth weight, an important influence on subsequent cognitive and physical development and on a range of adult diseases. In childhood, there are also socioeconomic gradients in growth and height, in language and cognition as well as in social and emotional adjustment (Bowling,