DoH ‘has failed to address inequalities’

1 Nov 10
The Department of Health dragged its feet for nine years on tackling health inequalities, MPs have said today.

By Mark Smulian

2 November 2010

The Department of Health dragged its feet for nine years on tackling health inequalities, MPs have said today.

A Public Accounts Committee report says that the gap in life expectancy between the poorest people and the whole population increased over under the Labour government, despite the party prioritising the tackling of inequality in 1997.

Efforts to reduce the life expectancy ‘gap’ between the 70 most deprived local authority areas and the rest of England by 10% were not adequate, the MPs found.

‘It is of great concern that inequality in health has increased,’ the Tackling inequalities in life expectancy in areas with the worst health and deprivation report states. ‘We find it unacceptable that it took [the DH] until 2006 to establish this as an NHS priority.’

It took the previous government ten years to produce tools and guidance for medical actions proven to be cost-effective in reducing inequality, including blood pressure control, cholesterol reduction and smoking cessation.

‘It also failed to put in place mechanisms to hold providers and commissioners to account over whether they apply these interventions, and even now implementation of [them] is inconsistent,’ the report adds.

The committee said the gap in life expectancy between the 70 most deprived areas and the national average had widened by 7% for men and 14% for women since the mid-1990s, despite the emphasis on narrowing this.

Average male life expectancy is now 77.9 and female 82 nationally. But in the 70 areas it is only 75.8 and 80.4 respectively.

The department failed to use the 2004 revision of general practitioners’ contracts to ensure more doctors worked in deprived areas, the PAC said, but it also ‘expressed concern’ about whether the government’s intended move to GP commissioning would rectify this.

PAC chair Margaret Hodge said: ‘The fact that the gap continues to widen is of great concern. ‘The Department of Health has been exceptionally slow to tackle this problem.’

But Richard Vautrey, deputy chair of the British Medical Association’s GP committee, said the 2004 GP contract ‘has made significant headway in narrowing the gap in the provision of health care between deprived and affluent areas through the quality and outcomes framework, large parts of which focus on long-term conditions that are more common in deprived communities’. 

Public health minister Anne Milton said: ‘We must do much more to tackle health inequalities.

‘We need a new approach to improve the health of the poorest, fastest. The NHS has a key role, as do other government departments with a focus on child poverty, education, and the environment.

‘The government will consider the findings of this report carefully and respond in detail soon.’

 

 

           

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