The essence of a satisfactory health service is that the rich and poor are treated alike, that poverty is not a disability and wealth is not advantaged. – To what extent has Bevans vision for the British national health service been realised?

A long history of analysis of health inequalities has continually stressed the role of socio-economic circumstances and location as causal factors (DOH, 2001). The sense of social injustice stirred by the link between poverty and ill health was a strong factor in the establishment of the NHS in 1948. In the same year, the UN Declaration of Human Rights enshrined access to basic standards of living to support both health and healthcare in international law (Pinch, 1997). Inequalities in health have remained a politically sensitive topic, to the extent that the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments of the 1980s and early 1990s rephrased the phrase inequality with variation when reluctantly discussing the issue (Benzeval, 1997)….(short extract)