This toolkit is intended to support clinicians working across the UK.

Health inequalities are felt most directly by individuals and communities, but they also place a considerable burden on our health service.

This toolkit forms the major part of Sir Harry Burns’ President’s Project, for which he has picked the topic of how we can work together to reduce health inequalities. To inform the toolkit, we asked clinicians across the UK to tell us about initiatives they have seen or taken part in in their local areas, which have helped tackle such inequalities.

This toolkit is intended to support clinicians and medical students working across the UK, not to lay the responsibility for reducing health inequalities at their feet. Neither is it intended as a replacement for our campaigning at the BMA to ensure UK governments meet their responsibilities to reduce health inequalities.

Doctors are close to the problem of health inequalities and see it in their work every day. The stories of projects we have collected in this toolkit are to give colleagues ideas to try should they wish to act themselves.

We are keen to keep the toolkit as relevant and as useful as possible. If you are involved in a project that seeks to address health inequalities that you would like to share with colleagues, please email info.phh@bma.org.uk to request a submission form.

It is incredibly difficult for clinicians like me to see in our patients the human cost of worsening health inequalities. The government must provide the resources to allow the health service the time and space to observe and intervene. Meanwhile, this toolkit will make it easier for doctors to take action. Together, we can make a difference.”

Dr Krishna Kasaraneni, NHS GP in Sheffield

Wherever you work and whatever your specialty, I hope this toolkit will help support you in any work looking to address health inequalities affecting your patients and communities.”

Sir Harry Burns, BMA President 2020-21

How to use this toolkit

This toolkit follows a tiered approach:

  • projects in Tier 1 will require action that is the least time or resource intensive
  • projects in Tier 2 will require action that is somewhat time or resource intensive
  • projects in Tier 3 will require action that is the most time or resource intensive.

Please note, the tier system does not denote quality or value. We believe that all the projects outlined in this toolkit are of enormous value and are tiered only because we recognise every clinician will have varying levels of time, resources, and energy to devote to the collective goal of reducing health inequalities.

Some of the determinants of inequality this toolkit might help you address first are:

  • health education
  • substance abuse
  • income insecurity
  • experience of the criminal justice system
  • access to healthcare.