Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
Isn&#x27;t this true just about everywhere? Someone who lives in a major urban area is going to have more prompt access to advanced emergency healthcare than someone who lives in a remote rural area, simply due to factors such as travel time, and the clinical need to physically concentrate specialist medical resources (specialist clinical teams need a certain minimum case volume to properly maintain their skills, and if you try to spread them too thinly, you can actually worsen patient outcomes)–but that inevitably means that some people in remote rural areas will die before they get the treatment they need, whereas they may well have survived if they&#x27;d lived in a major urban area instead. Inefficiencies and inequities in healthcare systems can no doubt worsen this phenomena, but even if you could have the most efficient and equitable healthcare system possible, it would still inevitably happen, even if to a somewhat reduced degree.<p>The only countries which can totally avoid this problem, are those that are so small that the whole country is a single major urban area, and &quot;remote rural areas&quot; either don&#x27;t exist at all, or are such a minuscule percentage of the population as to be a statistical rounding error – so basically city-states such as Singapore, Monaco or Vatican City