Deciding to make a difference

As England's public health system is on the brink of enormous change, a timely study of how public health decisions are made comes from a team at Liverpool University. Taking cardiovascular disease as a case study, researchers looked at decision-making by healthcare and public service professionals in an effort to reduce health inequalities. A study in the European Journal of Public Health compares Scotland and Belgium's policies to tackle ethnic inequalities in health, in which Scotland is shown to have played the better game (score: Belgium 1 Scotland 4, the study's authors claim).