Social inequalities in contemporary society

Learning Outcomes: 1) Explore the nature of contemporary society 2) Analyse how social inequalities influence the life chances and health of individuals

To completely understand our changing society, we must look at the history of change we have gone through. To do this we must identify the changing factors of our society. This includes the age of our population; the roles gender has taken on, how race and ethnicity has affected our society, why and how social class works and the geographical location of people in Britain. In this report all these
This is the strongest inequality in health care (8).
To keep an eye out for the inequalities in health care system the government has set up the national statistics socio-economic classification (NS-SEC), this show’s the correlation between social classes and health inequalities and allows people to see where there is need for concern. N.Abercrombie (1994) identified 3 major problems with the NHS provisions:
· Social Class Inequalities in Distribution: evidence suggests that health care still favours the better off – an issue which existed before the NHS started in 1948
· Geographical Distribution: some areas area’s provided for, some are not, and where you live is critically important.
· Priorities of the Medical Professions: care of the elderly and mentally ill are drastically under resourced, with areas with new technology specialises and more prestige research still tend to do much better (9).

Another contributing factor is the rise of private health care; this is leading to a large gap in health care between the classes. In 1981, Ann Shearer suggested that 3.5 million people where covered privately, in 1994 that had risen to 5 million, this is due to more of the lower social classes, such as the skilled classes, now deciding to go private (9).

Geographical location

The UK, has a growing population, it grew by 349,000 people in the year to mid of 2006, that’s a 0.6% increase. Since 1971, the UK’s population has increased by 8%,