Studies have shown clearly that communities most at risk of ill health tend to have the poorest access to the range of preventive health services, including cancer screening programmes.
There are widespread geographical inequalities in the quality and type of treatment patients receive, because of shortages of specialist staff, fragmentation of care, inadequate access to surgical facilities, a postcode lottery on prescribing and insufficient radiotherapy facilities.
Many patients prefer to be able to die at home, but in practice only a quarter are able to do so, as a lack of community or specialist palliative care teams in some parts of the country conspires with inconsistent access to out-of-hours nursing care to prevent their wishes being met.
