High up in a new Holyrood report on the health inequalities between the richest and poorest parts of Scotland, there is a statistic which illustrates the scale of the problem.

A boy born in Lenzie, says the report by the health committee, can expect to live until he is 82 while a boy born only eight miles away in Carlton, in the east end of Glasgow, can expect to live until he is only 54 - a stark, shocking difference of 28 years.

Faced with this grim statistic, the committee might have been expected to call on the NHS to do more to fix the problem, but it has rightly concluded that the health service alone cannot provide a solution for the simple reason that the health inequalities in our society reflect much wider social and economic inequalities. The NHS can do its bit, particularly in ensuring the poorest communities have equal access to health services (shockingly, those living in the most deprived communities often struggle most to access good local health services), but the health gap will only be narrowed if action is taken in other policy areas that contribute to the gap in the first place.

The first of them is education. There a distinct lack of social diversity in many schools, largely because of middle-class parents choosing "good" schools for their children. And at university level too, you are much more likely to win a place, and thrive, if you are middle class. The problem is particularly bad in Scotland, which sends a smaller proportion of pupils from lower socio-economic groups to university than England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The second area is employment, where there has been a proliferation in recent years of part-time, low-paid jobs often on zero-hour terms rather than secure, well-paid positions. The current improvement in the employment rate in Scotland will help, but the committee is right to express concern.

And the third area is household income, where in many ways the inequalities are most striking but also most susceptible to government action. Again, Scotland is one of the world's poorest performers (according to an Oxfam report last year, Scotland's wealthiest households are 273 times better off than the poorest) and recent action, and inaction, on tax and welfare has not helped, with the UK Government's welfare reforms in particular undermining the income of some of Scotland's poorest households.

Government action, in Edinburgh and London, is needed in all these areas if the health inequalities they cause in the long term are to be tackled. It is encouraging that the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has made it her personal mission to end inequality of access to education within a generation, but some radical thinking is needed on education. Higher pay to encourage the best teachers to work in poor areas is worth considering for example. The Scottish Government should also look carefully at how funding affects access - the recent cuts to grants will certainly not help improve it.

To tackle the inequalities in work and income, there is action that the Scottish and UK Government could take. The minimum wage is still too low, but if the income gap is to be tackled, reasonable restrictions also have to be made on earning at the top and this must mean a fairer tax system. Everyone should be paying a fair share but the UK Government is still not doing enough to control tax avoidance by the wealthiest individuals and corporations. Fairer tax remains a critical part of reducing the gap between the rich and the poor.

Action on all of these fronts could lead to a healthier Scotland. As Sir Harry Burns, the former Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, told the health committee, there is nothing intrinsically unhealthy about Scotland or the Scots - we started to become the sick man of Europe when the gap between the rich and the poor began to grow. But more now needs to be done to reduce that gap and, while the NHS has a part to play, it is up to ministers to find a much wider range of ways to do it.