ABSTRACT
Barcelona, located in the northeast of the country, is the second largest city in Spain. Its population has decreased from 1,701,812 inhabitants in 1986 to 1,508,805 in 1996, and is increasingly ageing. After the restoration of democracy in the mid-1970s, the first democratic municipal elections were held in 1979, and a succession of coalitions led by the Socialist Party has governed the city. The city administration has had public health as part of its priorities for some time: a health information system was developed and new policies and interventions were set up. Barcelona was the first place in Spain to implement a Health Interview Survey (in 1983), and since 1984 an annual report on the health of the city has been presented to the city council by the Municipal Public Health Institute. This led to the identification of territorial inequalities in health, which in turn pointed to issues to be tackled by health policies or interventions. In this chapter we present four of the different interventions implemented in the city to reduce socioeconomic inequalities in health. These were selected because they have been subjected to formal evaluation and have produced research reports.
