Disease and ill-health demand responses – mainly although not always from biomedical health systems, public health initiatives and policies around health and safety across all sectors – housing and sanitation, roads and transport, public spaces and places of work. Lay, informal, and complementary health systems can also be included as a part of the wider response to conditions of disease and ill-health. Health systems require resources – human, financial and material – but inequalities in health outcome are manifest in all of these areas from precarious and unsafe working conditions, to unequal access to health insurance and lack of universal health coverage.