Glossary
Coronary heart disease
This term is used throughout and is synonymous with ischaemic heart disease. It may be manifest by angina (stable or unstable), acute myocardial infarction, or heart failure.
Coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG)
A major surgical operation in which the blood supply to the heart is restored by replacing blocked arteries with arteries usually taken from the chest wall.
Demand
indicates a patient desire or preference for an intervention which may or may not be needed.
Deprivation
is derived from variables collected in the census (unemployment, overcrowding, housing tenure, living alone) and gives an indication of the degree of social adversity in the geographic area in which people live.
Equity
or its counterpart, inequity, reflects a (mis)match between need and provision, at any given level of access, such that patients' sociodemographic characteristics may have an influence on their receipt of health care over and above their need. It may or may not be a reflection of access, demand or doctor behaviour.
Inverse Care Law
states that the availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely to the need for it in the population served (Tudor Hart, 1971).
Need
is the concept that a patient has a clinical condition for which there is an effective intervention.
Percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA)
unblocks coronary arteries by inserting a thin tube (usually) from the groin up the major arteries and then into the coronary artery. A balloon in the tip of the tube is inflated to push aside the blockage and restore the blood supply. A stent may also be placed across the blockage at the same time to keep the artery open.
Provision
reflects the process of actual medical care and hence is a major contributor to the spending of health care resources.
Standardised mortality ratio (SMR)
is the ratio of the observed level of mortality to the expected level of mortality fixed to a reference level of 100.
Ward
refers to the census geographic unit, including populations ranging from less than a 1000 to over 15,000 people. In the geographic analyses presented here, ward is the smallest level of area examined.
