Poverty status is linked to worse quality of care

People living in England’s most deprived areas of England seem to receive the worst quality of healthcare across various types of service, concludes new research from health experts.1

Examples of inequality included spending longer in hospital accident and emergency departments and having worse experiences when making GP appointments.

The research from QualityWatch, a joint programme of the health think tanks the Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation, involved looking at 23 measures of healthcare quality to see how these were affected by deprivation. The measures included avoidable mortality rate, smoking prevalence, emergency admissions for various types of care, obesity prevalence in children, infant mortality rate, experience of making a GP appointment and …