Ulf Gerdtham

The main purpose of this project is to identify and quantify the major causal mechanisms that drive the changes in socioeconomic health inequalities in Sweden.

This study considers the reliability of a standardised client approach to inform policy makers about the quality of the clinical encounter at primary healthcare centres in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape metro areas.

South Africa’s poor health outcomes have traditionally been attributed to poverty, unequal and ineffective spending and the high disease burden, but increasingly it is recognized that the public health system may also be contributing to such problems by delivering services that do not always conform to the stipulated standards.

Globally, mental illness is more responsible for extreme distress than poverty or unemployment, and, to compound the problem, mental illness interacts with poverty and unemployment in socially and economically impactful ways that create reinforcing cycles.