Is ‘Candidacy’ a Useful Concept for Understanding Journeys through Public Services? A Critical Interpretive Literature Synthesis

Across the public sector there is concern that service uptake is inequitably distributed by socio‐economic circumstances and that public provision exacerbates the existence of inequalities either because services are not allocated by need or because of differential patterns of uptake between the most and least affluent groups. A concept that offers potential to understand access and utilization is ‘candidacy’ which has been used to explain...