9 years on: what progress has been made on achieving UK health-care equity?

The issue is complex: we also know that sociallydeprived patients have higher emergency attendance and admission rates29,31 and are more likely to enter mental-health care via adversarial routes, often involving the police rather than via the family doctor.32 The extent to which these findings can be explained by patientrelated factors such as poor health literacy (defined as the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services to make appropriate health decisions), by clinical judgment, or by mutual agreement between the family doctor and patient needs to be explored.