Social justice and health equity - Professor Sir Michael Marmot - Bradford Hill Seminar 28 Feb 2024

On 28 February 2024 Professor Sir Michael Marmot of the Institute of Health Equity and UCL Department of Epidemiology & Public Health delivered a Bradford Hill Seminar on 'Social justice and health equity'
Abstract
Taking action to reduce health inequalities is a matter of social justice. In developing strategies for tackling health inequalities we need to confront the social gradient in health not just the difference between the worst off and everybody else. There is clear evidence when we look across countries that national policies make a difference and that much can be done in cities, towns and local areas. But policies and interventions must not be confined to the health care system; they need to address the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. The evidence shows that economic circumstances are important but are not the only drivers of health inequalities. Tackling the health gap will take action, based on sound evidence, across the whole of society.
About Professor Sir Michael Marmot
Sir Michael Marmot MBBS, MPH, PhD, FRCP, FFPHM, FMedSci, FBA has been Professor of Epidemiology at University College London since 1985.
He is the author of The Health Gap: the challenge of an unequal world (Bloomsbury: 2015), and Status Syndrome: how your place on the social gradient directly affects your health (Bloomsbury: 2004). Professor Marmot is the Advisor to the WHO Director-General, on social determinants of health, in the new WHO Division of Healthier Populations; Distinguished Visiting Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong (2019-), and co-Director of the of the CUHK Institute of Health Equity. He is the recipient of the WHO Global Hero Award; the Harvard Lown Professorship (2014-2017) and
the Prince Mahidol Award for Public Health (2015).
Marmot has led research groups on health inequalities for nearly 50 years. He chaired the Commission on Equity and Health Inequalities in the Americas, set up in 2015 by the World Health Organization’s Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO/ WHO) and chaired the Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), which was set up by the World Health Organization in 2005, and produced the report entitled: ‘Closing the Gap in a Generation’ in August 2008. At the request of the British Government, he conducted the Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England post 2010, which published its report ‘Fair Society, Healthy Lives’ in February 2010. This was followed by the European Review of Social Determinants of Health and the Health Divide, for WHO EURO in 2014; Health Equity in England: Marmot Review 10 Years On, in 2020; Build Back Fairer: the COVID-19 Marmot Review in 2021; and the Report of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, for WHO EMRO, also in 2021.
He served as President of the British Medical Association (BMA) in 2010-2011, and as President of the World Medical Association in 2015. In 2000 he was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen, for services to epidemiology and the understanding of health inequalities. Professor Marmot is a Member of the National Academy of Medicine.