Causes of health inequality

• Poverty is the biggest cause of ill health in the UK, due to its impact on diet and long term health conditions and its relatedness to factors such as environment
• People in the poorest communities

  Have poorer diets as the lack of money forces them to resort to cheap fast foods and cheap processed foods, which tend to have higher amounts of fats, sugars and salts
• People in the most deprived areas of Scotland


  • 32% are obese, whereas only 20% of those in the least deprived
• People in poverty have a higher prevalence of long term health conditions, which could be due to poor diet and bad lifestyle choices
• People in poverty have a 60% prevalence of long-term health conditions
• People in the most deprived areas spend a third of their lives in poor health, that is twice the proportion of those spent in the least deprived areas
• Those that live in poverty

  Will always have poorer health which can result in them being less able to complete basic tasks such as going to work which could end up leaving them in the cycle of poverty
• Lifestyle choices

  Choosing to drink alcohol, smoking and not exercising
• Lifestyle choices

  Can lead to poor mental and physical health
• Alcohol and smoking is often abused by people who are poorer as a way of escaping poverty related stresses and pressures
• Alcohol specific death is 8x higher for those in the most deprived areas than those in the least deprived
• 90% of lung cancer deaths are linked to people that have smoked
• Many people choose to ignore the government recommendation of 30 minutes of exercise per day
• NHS England reports that 1 in 6 deaths in the UK can be attributed to a lack of exercise
• However, at the end of the day everyone makes a choice on whether they want to excercise and lead a health lifestyle
• Gender


  Can influence an individual's health
• There are major inequalities in morbidity and mortality between men and women, especially compared to people in poorer communities and people in more affluent areas
• Inequalities in health


  • Men and women can have up to 23.8 and 22.6 more years of good health respectively, when compared to people in poorer areas and more affluent areas
• Women on average live longer than men
• Life expectancy


  • Women in Scotland are expected to live up to age 81.6 whereas men are 77.1
• Men are more likely to experience mental health issues such as anxiety and depression
• Toxic masculinity


  Stereotypes such as "Man Up" which may push men's real feelings deep down to show masculinity
• Suicide rates


  • Males remain almost 3 times as likely to die by suicide than females
• Women will spend more of their later years in poorer health than men, despite living longer
• Years in poor health

  • Women are expected to live for 18.9 years in poor health and males are expected to live in poorer health for 15.1 years
• Ethnicity, Plays a smaller role in poor health. Ethnic minorities in the UK tend to have higher rates of cardio-vascular diseases than white people. This is due to hereditary factors based off ethnicity.

  
  

  For example, levels of heart diseases and diabetes among south Asians are higher than other ethnic groups.

  
  

  Furthermore during the 2019 covid pandemic, death rates were highest among people of black and Asian ethnicity, people of Bangladeshi ethnicity had twice the risk of death than people of white British ethnicity.