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This glossary reflects a (re‐)emerging awareness within public health of the political dimension of health and health inequalities, and it also attempts to define some of the key concepts from the political science literature in a way that will be of use in future public health analyses. Examples from different domains (healthcare and population health) are provided to highlight how political concepts pervade health.

Health inequalities continue to be a pressing issue for governments and communities in the Western developed nations. Recent evidence continues to highlight the prevalence of inequities in morbidity (experience of illness over the lifecourse) and mortality (death rate) and suggest that, despite significant improvement in health and wellbeing for large sections of populations, their continues to be a gap between the health of the most affluent and the poorest. These discussions are particularly pertinent to the UK, which, as Professor Marmot (2010) has documented in detail in his recent report, continues to experience significance health inequalities which are largely the outcome of differentials in socioeconomic status. It is the strong recommendation of the Marmot report, and one that we would echo, that reduction in health inequalities can only be achieved by addressing their fundamental causes, as opposed to the diseases through which they are manifest at any given time, or their immediate antecedents. This fact explains both the persistence of health inequalities over time and the failure of policies which only target their immediate manifestations to have any lasting impact. Fundamental causes include; unequal distribution of power, money, resources and social status.