Vulnerable families face significant health inequalities, despite rising life expectancy across Western Europe. While access to good healthcare is important, it only accounts for 15-25% of health inequalities. A range of social determinants crucially drive trends around mortality and ill-health, including quality of education, housing, employment, working conditions and welfare.
These are among the findings of a new Deloitte Centre for Health Solutions report – Breaking the Dependency Cycle: Tackling Health Inequalities of Vulnerable Families – which warns of the damaging consequences of health inequality.
Our study reveals how health inequalities hold back all generations, from early childhood to old age. Offering a host of case studies, it recommends a life-cycle approach to vulnerable families – with governments and providers urged to break down organisational barriers and collectively face up to challenges.
Health inequalities have a substantial economic impact, hitting labour productivity and accounting for an estimated 20% of European healthcare costs. But they also take a social toll, with negative socioeconomic circumstances having a cumulative effect throughout a person’s life. Unemployment and financial disadvantages pass between generations, as vulnerable children become vulnerable adults.
Health inequality threatens people across all life stages, including:
A whole-system, whole-life approach is urgently needed to tackle health inequalities. Governments, providers, academics and businesses must integrate their services, working across institutional boundaries instead of in silos. We recommend that: