A fairer future: how can the NHS tackle health and social inequities?

So why, 74 years after its creation, do people experience inequitable health outcomes?

Hailed as “the first health system in any Western society to offer free medical care to the entire population”, the NHS was designed, from inception, to be a universal service, free at the point of use, with access based on clinical need rather than an ability to pay. The NHS constitution states that it has “a wider social duty to promote equity through the services it provides and to pay particular attention to groups or sections of society where improvements in health and life expectancy are not keeping pace with the rest of the population.”

Despite this fundamental commitment to equity, people in the different regions of England experience large variations in health outcomes.