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Welfare benefits’ screening and referral: a new direction for community nurses?
Author(s) -
Hoskins Msc Robert,
Carter Diana E.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
health and social care in the community
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.984
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1365-2524
pISSN - 0966-0410
DOI - 10.1046/j.1365-2524.2000.00264.x
Subject(s) - entitlement (fair division) , life expectancy , disadvantaged , welfare , social security , economic growth , social isolation , business , demographic economics , medicine , political science , environmental health , economics , population , mathematical economics , psychiatry , law
The White Paper, Towards a Healthier Scotland considerably widens the community nursing scope for health promotion, as it recognises that disadvantaged life circumstances as well as unhealthy lifestyles contribute to poor health. It has been shown that income and health are interrelated. This evidence has demonstrated that it is not how rich a nation is that determines the overall health of its inhabitants; it is how equitably its wealth is distributed that counts: countries that have narrow income differentials tend to have better health. Both the income and health divide in Britain widened considerably between 1980 and 1992. It is argued that increasing income inequality leads to social isolation and chronic stress, which can impact on psycho‐social pathways and damages life expectancy. This paper suggests that community nurses can address adverse life circumstances by finding ways of improving the economic status of their most vulnerable clients, and that one way of doing this would be to ensure that clients claim their full quota of welfare entitlement, given that there is several billion pounds of social security benefits that remain unclaimed in Britain every year.