"Of course, we all want everyone to have everything, but surely the first priority is the basics of health care for everyone," says Clare Short, Secretary of State at the Department for International Development (DFID), UK, in From Docklands to Dhaka, the latest film in TVE's Life series. "But in most developing countries that's not the case."

This Life programme explores the inseparable links between poverty and health and discovers that a prospering global economy doesn't necessarily equate with good health.

Life invited Dr. Sam Everington, who runs a community health clinic in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, to visit Dhaka City, Bangladesh, to investigate the Bangladeshi health service.

No stranger to the contradictions between prosperity and bad health, Sam is all too aware of the inequalities in health care which he sees every day on his own Tower Hamlets home visits. "We're one mile away from the Docklands here," he says at the beginning of the programme, "We're one mile away from the richest part of the country, yet we're in the poorest part of the country - with some of the worst health that you'll find in this country. Not only that, but with illnesses you'd normally expect to find in the Third World."

In From Docklands to Dhaka, Life gets to the root of the vicious cycle of poor health and poverty that all too often spirals into inescapable misery: "Poor people are generally not very healthy and if you are not healthy you cannot work well and you also spend money trying to get healthy," comments Fred Sai, Professor of Community Health at the University of Ghana.

At a rural clinic in Bangladesh, Sam is introduced to patients by fellow doctor Zafrullah Chowdhury, who - like him - is seeking wider solutions to his patients' problems: "Simply doling out medicine doesn't create health," both men agree. "Employment has got a tremendous impact on the health care. So employment leads to good housing, good sanitation and good health."

Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director General, World Health Organization, puts the situation in its wider global context: "One point two, one point three billion people live on less that one dollar a day. And the diseases linked to poverty are a devastating blow to the opportunities of these families and people to move out of their poverty, because the health of these people are linked to their ability to learn; their ability to believe that their children will be growing up as healthy individuals."

TRANSCRIPT Read the full transcript of From Docklands to Dhaka