Unveiled by Health Minister Alan Johnson this week, the report outlines new plans to deal with health inequalities that are increasing the gap between rich and poor.

The mental health charity Rethink say that less than half of people with severe mental illness are getting the health checks GPs are meant to provide.

People from African Caribbean communities are among those which suffer the poorest health within the UK, with discrimination characterising the experience of many from these communities when trying to access healthcare.

This group are also more likely to be misdiagnosed and over medicated and are often tarred with the label of schizophrenia with the minimum of consultation.

Rethink chief executive Paul Jenkins said: "People with a severe mental illness die, on average, 10 years younger than other people. Not because of the mental illness, but because people are denied access to the cancer, heart disease and diabetes services the rest of the population now take for granted.

 "People with severe mental illness are meant to receive physical health checks at GP surgeries, but new research by Rethink suggests that less than half of people are actually getting them.

 "The government has opened its eyes to this problem, which is a step forward, but smoking rates and obesity levels remain unacceptably high. Too little imagination and too little cash is being invested in bringing them down. The Government has still not implemented recommendations from the ground-breaking Disability Rights Commission report two years ago, which called for the scandal of poor physical health amongst people with severe mental illness to be tackled without delay."

Lord Kamlesh Patel, recently highlighted how racism continues to have an adverse impact on black patients accessing equitable healthcare when the commenting on the findings of the Healthcare Commissions published a report on ethnic minority access to health services earlier this month.

A Disability Rights Commission report entitled, Unequal Treatment, was published in September 2006. Their findings revealed that women with schizophrenia are 42% more likely to get breast cancer and people diagnosed with schizophrenia are almost twice as likely as other citizens to have bowel cancer, which is the second most common cause of cancer death in Britain.

The research showed that people with schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder or depression have far higher rates of obesity, smoking, heart disease, diabetes, respiratory disease and stroke than other people. However despite this evidence, GP surgeries and health trusts are breaking the law by not implementing the Disability Discrimination Act. The mental health charity Rethink are calling for the Implementation of all recommendations from the Disability Rights Commission ‘Unequal Treatment' report of 2006 and for GPs to be incentives to promote physical health checks.

Reducing health inequalities remains one of the most critical challenges facing the NHS. While commementators say that there have been clear improvements to the overall health of the population, human rights groups point out that the inequality gap continues to widen.