Margaret Whitehead

Margaret Whitehead holds the W.H. Duncan Chair of Public Health, and is also the Head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Policy Research on the Social Determinants of Health. Margaret has worked extensively on social inequalities in health and in health care, in particular the question of what can be done to reduce them. To this end, she has been involved in a range of national and international efforts, including sitting on the UK Government’s Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health (the Acheson Inquiry) and the 2013 WHO European Review of Social Determinants and the Health Divide. She was a founder member of the 15-country Global Health Equity Initiative and led the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Affordability Ladder Program (ALPS) on equity and health sector reforms with collaborators in 8 countries worldwide. She also works on European Union and National Institute for Health Research-funded projects concerned with evaluating natural policy experiments for their impact on social inequalities in health. Margaret chaired the independent Inquiry into Health Equity for the North, commissioned by Public Health England, the report of which, entitled Due North, was published on 15th September 2014.