Review: Social exclusion of gypsies and travellers: Health impact

The sad reality of everyday life for Gypsies and Travellers is that they belong to a community of communities that have as their members the most excluded people in the UK today. They are also the group against which it is still widely acceptable to be discriminatory. Such discrimination manifests itself in our everyday talk and words we use to describe members of the Gypsy–Traveller communities as well as in the way services are constructed, which unwittingly or otherwise maintain the status quo of inequality.The messages in this paper are important: Gypsies and Travellers suffer third-world levels of health quality; health professionals and services both passively and actively contribute to these levels of health quality; health cannot be seen in isolation from other services and factors (such as accommodation, social justice and inclusion); and health workers need to take the lead from a recent national impetus to begin to make a change.Professionals are rarely presented with opportunities to make real change in society. By acknowledging the situation and context timely articulated in this paper those people involved in planning, organising and delivering health services have the very real opportunity to improve the life chances for an entire population of people. This paper should be of interest and value to anyone interested in making people’s lives better and fairer.