Health ‘needs focus on social aspects’

By a staff reporter

Private specialists travelled from as far as Wiltshire and Leicestershire for a well-attended London Consultants Association (LCA) dinner to hear Sir Michael Marmot speak passionately about the impact of social determinants on long-term health.

Sir Michael Marmot

The professor of epidemiology at University College London discussed how life expectancy in England has improved ‘about one year every four years since the end of World War One’, but improvement stopped in 2011. 

Doctors heard that most people in poverty are in a household where at least one adult is working. There has been a rise in mortality from what he described as ‘deaths of despair’.