How important is it to avoid indices of deprivation that include health variables in analyses of health inequalities?

Although there is a logical problem in using deprivation indices that include health outcomes to rank areas to calculate the scale of health inequalities, the impact of using an alternative subindex containing only data from the income and employment domains is minimal. For population-wide analyses of health inequalities in Scotland, the SIMD does not introduce a substantial bias in the health inequalities summary measures despite substantial movement of small areas between ranked population tenths. Although not examined here, this is likely to be relevant to other similar indices across the United Kingdom.