Introduction

This chapter looks at poor health and its impacts on and interactions with poverty. There is the idea that poor health leads to poverty, and it does sounds as though it could or should be the case. However, there is now extremely strong (and growing) evidence that poverty actually leads to poor health. Even short-term falls in income increase the risk of ill health (Smith at al, 2007: 58). This causal relationship is strong and is also seen in people with disabilities: those who become disabled are more likely to have been poor beforehand. This means that factors, such as poverty and inequality, are powerful, pervasive and harmful to health. This sounds counterintuitive: it sounds more logical that ill health prevents you from earning money and so makes you poor. This chapter aims to explain the relationship between poverty and ill health and illuminate the ways in which it has particularly strong consequences for children and young people. This chapter does not focus on disability, as disabled people can have good health even though they are relatively high-frequency users of health services. Disability is, however, discussed in Chapter 8, along with ethnicity, as factors that increase the risk of poverty.

Poverty affects health directly and indirectly through the unequal distribution of health-related factors such as good quality housing, work, education, access to services and social and cultural opportunities. This in turn can lead to the unequal and unfair distribution of good health, ill health, healthy years of life, and life expectancy across affluent (and other) societies. When looking at how health has an impact on child poverty the first aspect to consider is whether the poor health is experienced by the parent or the child – this will have differential effects on child poverty and may affect children's experience of poverty in different ways. Parental health is greatly important for child wellbeing; having a parent with health issues creates many problems for children, especially in relation to their engagement with school, friends and wider society.