Equity in primary health care provision: more than 50 years of the inverse care law

Professor Julian Tudor Hart was a Welsh general practitioner who meticulously documented the inequity in healthcare access and outcomes that he saw for the patients in his disadvantaged community. In this special issue, we have a first-hand account of Tudor Hart and his work from Professor Felicity Goodyear-Smith, who worked with him in his practice and saw his commitment to research embedded within clinical practice that aimed to improve people’s lives. It’s been just over 50 years since Tudor Hart published his seminal paper outlining the Inverse Care Law, ‘the availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need of the population served’
(Hart 1971). This paper has influenced healthcare within many systems and highlighted the need for consciously advocating for appropriate levels of access for at-risk groups and as a driver for universal healthcare.