Health for All and British health policy: a comment on the quest for “healthy public policy”

Abstract

Explains that Health for All is an international extra‐governmental movement that seeks to pursue equity in access to health‐related resources by broadening the scope of health policy. Notes that its major principles include social participation in state decision making, inter‐sectoral collaboration in policy formulation and the improvement of conditions for the disadvantaged. Points out that its local initiatives often encompass health‐service professionals and practitioners as well as the voluntary sector, social services and other local authority departments, and that the effect of this local activity on political understandings of health at a national level gives some indication of the extent to which this local time and effort have been justified. In this respect, notes two limits to the impact of the Health for All movement on the political debates about health in Britain. Suggests that these centre on a largely indifferent but powerful national government and an emphasis within the movement initiatives at the level of a politically marginalized local state.