Next steps

Through our review of the published statistics and our conversations with producers, it is clear that producers across the four nations of the UK are committed to increasing knowledge on health inequalities. Producers are collaborating both across departments and with organisations outside of government to do so. We encourage producers to continue this work and will discuss progress and challenges with them through our regular engagement.

We will continue to focus on health inequalities in our regulatory work, such as assessments and compliance checks of health statistics, particularly where users highlight gaps in information which impact their ability to understand inequalities. Since inequalities cut across all aspects of health (public health, conditions and diseases, access to and experiences of services and treatments, and the outcomes of all these factors), we think it is important that teams working to produce statistics across all these areas consider how they can incorporate analysis of inequalities into their outputs.

Finally, we will monitor the various strategies and policies of governments across the UK aimed at reducing health inequalities, to understand what metrics will be used to measure their success. Data transparency is important as it ensures that progress is visible and can be scrutinised, allowing the public to hold governments to account for their commitments to reducing health inequalities.