Table 4.

Reasons for NOT asking patients about their socioeconomic circumstances

Reasons	Citations
Reasons relating to individual healthcare encounters
Socioeconomic enquiries will conflict with clinical tasks	[121]
Socioeconomic enquiries will overburden clinicians	[117, 121]
Socioeconomic enquiries might foster patient distrust	[118]
Reasons relating to data
Data collection would be of poor quality, especially among deprived groups	[116–118]
Existing sources of socioeconomic information are adequate	[115, 117–119]
Limits to medicine
Social health determinants lay outside the remit of the medical profession	[100, 120, 121]