Progress has been made on tobacco especially in Glasgow – but the increasing health inequalities must be reversed

The Amanjit Jhund NHS Column

I’ve been up in my home town of Glasgow this weekend visiting my parents and I took the opportunity to help out on Willie Bain‘s campaign for the Glasgow North East by-election.

I haven’t been back to this area of Glasgow in over a decade and it’s a very different place to the one that I remember.

Back in secondary school when I was about 15 years old I was a volunteer at the Marie Curie hospice in Springburn, helping to look after terminally ill cancer patients. Every Sunday I’d get the train from the affluent area of Glasgow where I grew up into one of the most deprived areas of the UK.

My weekly trips to Springburn were for me a political and cultural awakening. I wasn’t in any way shocked or surprised by what I experienced in the hospice but it was the simple walk to and from the train station that opened my eyes to some of the deprivation that blighted this part of Glasgow. I’d never before had to cross the street just to avoid gangs of youths, and it was the first time I’d ever seen needles discarded in the street or drunks literally passed out in the gutter.

Today I saw a much improved area. The investment in housing had clearly paid off, everywhere I went there were signs of regeneration and development, many of the older buildings have been knocked down and where the odd 60’s highrise monstrosity remains they are planned for demolition in the near future. The streets of my youth are no longer as intimidating as they were, and they don’t seem as poverty stricken to me.

It would be nice to claim that after 12 years of record investment in public services that everything has gotten better in Glasgow North East, but the statistics would suggest otherwise. The previous Labour administrations in both Holyrood and Westminster as well as the current SNP administration have all presided over an increasing gap in health inequalities in Scotland.

While the life expectancy in Glasgow North East has increased, it has not risen as fast as in the more affluent areas such as East Dunbartonshire where I grew up. We have also seen both a real and relative increase in the levels of drug and alcohol abuse, and the health and socio-economic problems that result.

The SNP government have set up a ministerial task force under the name of “Equally Well” in an attempt to combat the increasing inequalities in healthcare across Scotland.

The four priority areas of the Equally Well task force are:

* Children’s very early years

* Cardiovascular disease and cancer

* Drug and alcohol problems and links to violence

* Mental health and wellbeing

One glimmer of hope in the fight against these inequalities rests with the figures relating to tobacco consumption.

Across every demographic we have seen a steady decline in the use of tobacco. As outlined in the “Better Health Better Care Action Plan” this has been accompanied by a reduction in deaths from Ischaemic Heart Disease (IHD) lung cancer, cerebrovascular disease, and chronic respiratory disease. In all of these tobacco plays a major role in the development of the disease.

Although Tobacco use is still most prevalent in areas of socio-economic deprivation it has been the significant reduction in its use even in these areas that gives rise to a great deal of optimism.

Our success in combating tobacco has stemmed from a variety of sources: from the smoking ban to a reduction in advertising, there has been a persistent multifaceted approach taken addressing it. In many ways the most important Government-led intervention has been the development and implementation of a comprehensive education policy on tobacco.

It is both this multi-faceted approach and focus on education that I believe we will have to copy in order to succeed with the aims of Equally Well.

Of course I hope that Willie Bain will win the by-election, and I’ll be back in Glasgow North East tomorrow trying my best to contribute towards this. But whoever wins this contest I do wish them the very best of luck in trying to reverse the ever increasing health inequalities that blight this area of Glasgow.