My mother was born in the North East of England in the 1950s. She spent her ... This was where she met my father - born and ... examines how geography is a matter of life and death: where you live can kill you. Chapter 1 ... Building on this, Chapter 5 'It's the (Political) Economy' argues that whilst place matters for health,.
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Health divides: Where you live can kill you Clare Bambra
Preface My mother was born in the North East of England in the 1950s. She spent her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne, where her father worked at a shipyard. She moved to the West Midlands city of Coventry, by way of Australia (as a "Ten Pound Pom"), in the 1970s. This was where she met my father - born and raised in Kent, where his father owned a chain of butcher shops, before he too made his way to Coventry as a student. My brother and I were also born in Kent but spent most of our school years in the East Anglian fens of Lincolnshire. My undergraduate years were spent in
SAMPLE – FULL BOOK AVAILABLE HERE: https://policypress.co.uk/health-divides Birmingham before working across the North in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Durham. So, this book on health divides is in part inspired by this personal experience of England’s “North South divide”. It is also though a product of my work as a university researcher, based in the North of England, who has examined international, national, regional and local inequalities in health for well over a decade.
This book examines geographical health divides between high-income countries (with a focus on the US health disadvantage), between the countries of the UK (particularly the Scottish health effect), between the English regions (the North South divide) and between deprived and affluent areas of the towns and cities of high-income countries (with a case study of the town of Stockton on Tees in the North East of England). The book examines the historical and contemporary nature of these health divides: when they emerged and how they have developed over time, what they are like today, what explains them and what the future might hold. It shows that these geographical inequalities in health are longstanding and universal – present to a greater of lesser extent across both space and time. It examines the multiple causes of these health inequalities and argues that the fundamental drivers are the political and economic choices we make as a society and the way they shape the places in which we live, work and play. This book places inequalities in health and examines how geography is a matter of life and death: where you live can kill you.
Chapter 1 ‘Health Divides’ provides a general introduction to the themes of the book, outlining the scales of contemporary health divides internationally nationally regionally, and locally. It introduces the book’s case studies: the US health disadvantage, the Scottish health effect, the North-South health divide in England, and local health inequalities within the towns and cities of wealthy countries. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the relationship between place, politics and health inequality: why it is that where you live can kill you.
SAMPLE – FULL BOOK AVAILABLE HERE: https://policypress.co.uk/health-divides
Chapter 2 ‘From King Cholera to the C Word’ provides historical context by looking at life and death from the 19th century onwards. It examines the main causes of death and disease in wealthy countries in the industrial age: the time when fevers and consumption claimed millions of lives. It outlines what the key health divides were like in this period and how the conditions of the industrial age impacted on them. It also examines how death and disease changed from the end of the 19th century onwards including the emergence of the welfare state.
Chapter 3 ‘In Sickness and In Health’ examines the causes of death and disease in wealthy countries today and how health varies depending on where you live. It demonstrates the consistent nature of health divides across a variety of diseases: that internationally, health is consistently worse in the USA; within the UK, that Scotland fares worse; regionally that the North of England does worse than the South; and that the deprived neighbourhoods of major towns and cities experience a health penalty. The starkness, proximity and universality of contemporary health divides are demonstrated.
Chapter 4 - ‘Placing Life and Death’ - starts to explain why health divides exist, drawing on traditional geographical theories of how place effects health. It provides a detailed overview of the role of different compositional (who lives here) and contextual (what this place is like) factors in creating healthy or unhealthy places. Using the case study health divides, it shows how the US health disadvantage, the Scottish health effect, the North South divide and local health divides are a result of the combination of both poor people and poor places.
Building on this, Chapter 5 ‘It’s the (Political) Economy’ argues that whilst place matters for health, politics matters for place. So placing health therefore requires analysis to focus further upstream on the fundamental causes of inequalities in life and death: the politics of health. It shows how political ideologies, the exercise of power, and the resulting political institutions and policy choices shape the
SAMPLE – FULL BOOK AVAILABLE HERE: https://policypress.co.uk/health-divides composition and context of places resulting in health inequalities. Using the case study examples, it concludes that the nature and extent of geographical health divides today are the consequences of our collective political and economic choices.
Chapter 6 ‘Too Little, Too late’ follows on from this political analysis by examining how public policies have (or have not) addressed health inequalities. Using the UK as an example, health inequalities policy since the 1980s is examined within the wider context of the social and spatial determinants of health. The chapter shows the contradictions and inadequacies of such policies in the face of the wider political and economic context of neoliberalism. It reflects on what could and should be done to reduce health divides and stop geography from being a matter of life and death.
The concluding Chapter 7 ‘Past, Present, Future’ examines the lessons from the past in terms of the waxing and waning of health divides, the present challenges, and speculates about the future, considering whether geography will remain a matter of life and death: where you live can kill you.
