Health inequalities: data introduction

There is a lack of accurate and comprehensive data for measuring and monitoring many aspects of health inequalities – this is especially true for inequalities related to issues such as ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation etc.

Inequalities

These can be measured in a variety of ways, including:

• through health measures: by measuring differences in ‘health’ outcomes across populations, including self-assessed measures of physical and mental health, overall life expectancy, mortality or hospitalisation rates for particular diseases.
• Using one of the many social and economic outcomes, such as income, education, neighbourhood quality/safety, social class etc.
• Using specific measures of inequality between groups. This section presents a small number of different indicators of socioeconomic health inequality; the References section includes links to comprehensive guides to the measurement of health inequalities.

Many of the other sections also report on socioeconomic inequalities relevant to that section. For example, mortality rates by area deprivation for all-causes, suicide, coronary heart disease, stroke and many more.

Some limited information on ethnicity-related health inequalities is available. The ScotPHO Profiles also include data on health and health determinants for small geographical areas across Scotland: these therefore also enable comparison on some aspects of health and health related (geographical) inequality.