Smoothing things out

Spearhead groups were set up in 2001 to help England's most deprived areas in achieving health inequalities targets. By just over halfway through the programme, it became clear that these targets were not going to be reached and that progress was uneven amongst the Spearhead groups. A report from SDO NIHR looks at the reasons behind the inequalities in results and draws some conclusions on effective ways to tackle inequalities in health, looking in detail at cardiovascular disease, teenage pregnancy and cancer. Unusually, the report's authors used qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), which its authors suggest is better at analysing complex causal patterns, as are found in health inequalities.