How to deliver equitable access to the best possible care

Healthcare services often fall short in their efforts to provide the best care possible to everyone they treat.Sometimes this results from factors in individual health systems. In England, plans to remove national oversight of screening programmes risk undermining patient safety (doi:10.1136/bmj.q1117).1 And, across the UK, a cover up by the NHS and the government hid the truth for decades from tens of thousands of people infected by blood products or blood transfusions (doi:10.1136/bmj.q1139).2 “To save face and to save expense, there has been a hiding of much of the truth,” says Brian Langstaff, the retired High Court judge leading the infected blood inquiry. “The government repeatedly maintained that people received the best available treatment and that testing of blood donations began as soon as technology was available, and both claims were untrue.”Some failures in healthcare concentrate in conditions that don’t receive the attention warranted by their impact on people’s wellbeing…
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