Supplementary Material Author’s manuscript: Click here to view.(2.1M, pdf) Reviewer comments: Click here to view.(338K, pdf) Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank all selleck chem participants for their time, the project team who assisted with participant recruitment, Professor Elizabeth Kendall for her advice, and Claire Campbell and Ciara McLennan for their help with conducting interviews. Footnotes Contributors: FK, MAK, JAW and AJW participated in the design

of the main study. All authors were involved in the survey design, and SSM and AS assisted with data collection. SSM, AS and FK analysed the data pertaining to this study. SSM drafted the manuscript and all authors provided editorial comments. All authors also read and approved the final manuscript. Funding: This work was supported

by the Australian Government Department of Health as part of the Fifth Community Pharmacy Agreement Research and Development Programme managed by The Pharmacy Guild of Australia. The financial assistance provided must not be taken as endorsement of the contents of this study Competing interests: None. Ethics approval: This study was approved by the Griffith University Human Research Ethics Committee (PHM/12/11/HREC). Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. Data sharing statement: The larger study in which this sits is being published as a report, which was submitted to the Department of Health and The Pharmacy Guild of Australia in August 2014. Further information on this larger study is available here: http://5cpa.com.au/programs/research-and-development.
Health is defined by the WHO as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’.1 Health outcomes can be influenced by inaccessibility to health interventions for certain population groups, such as the poor and because of unequal distribution of medical resources. When differences in health outcomes across socioeconomic, demographic and geographic factors are avoidable, unnecessary and unjust they are described as health inequities.2 3 The WHO recognises that inequities

in health should be reduced since health is a fundamental human right4 and, in 2005, set up the Commision on Social Determinants of Health to collect, collate and synthesise evidence on inequities and to make recommendations for action to address Cilengitide them.5 Inequities in health and healthcare are well documented in relation to social and economic factors, according to the actronym PROGRESS-Plus, including Place of residence, Race/ethnicity/culture/language, Occupation, Gender/sex, Religion, Education, Socioeconomic status and Social capital6 and additional factors related to personal characteristic, features of relationships and time-dependent characteristics (captured by ‘Plus’).7 Equity issues have been shown to have negative effects on health status.