Chapter 4 Socioeconomic Determinants of Health
Define the social determinants of health. Select two determinants and explain how it affects their health both in a positive and negative.
The range of personal, social, economic, and environmental factors that influence health status are known as determinants of health.
Determinants of health fall under several broad categories:
It is the interrelationships among these factors that determine individual and population health. Because of this, interventions that target multiple determinants of health are most likely to be effective. Determinants of health reach beyond the boundaries of traditional health care and public health sectors; sectors such as education, housing, transportation, agriculture, and environment can be important allies in improving population health.
Policy making
Policies at the local, state, and federal level affect individual and population health. Increasing taxes on tobacco sales, for example, can improve population health by reducing the number of people using tobacco products. Some policies affect entire populations over extended periods of time while simultaneously helping to change individual behavior. For example, the 1966 Highway Safety Act and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act authorized the Federal Government to set and regulate standards for motor vehicles and highways. This led to an increase in safety standards for cars, including seat belts, which in turn reduced rates of injuries and deaths from motor vehicle accidents.
Social Factors
Social determinants of health reflect the social factors and physical conditions of the environment in which people are born, live, learn, play, work, and age. Also known as social and physical determinants of health, they impact a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes.
Health Services
Both access to health services and the quality of health services can impact health. Healthy People 2020 directly addresses access to health services as a topic area and incorporates quality of health services throughout a number of topic areas. Lack of access, or limited access, to health services greatly impacts an individual’s health status. For example, when individuals do not have health insurance, they are less likely to participate in preventive care and are more likely to delay medical treatment.
Individual Behavior
Individual behavior also plays a role in health outcomes. For example, if an individual quits smoking, his or her risk of developing heart disease is greatly reduced. Many public health and health care interventions focus on changing individual behaviors such as substance abuse, diet, and physical activity. Positive changes in individual behavior can reduce the rates of chronic disease in this country.
Biology and Genetics
Some biological and genetic factors affect specific populations more than others. For example, older adults are biologically prone to being in poorer health than adolescents due to the physical and cognitive effects of aging. Sickle cell disease is a common example of a genetic determinant of health. Sickle cell is a condition that people inherit when both parents carry the gene for sickle cell. The gene is most common in people with ancestors from West African countries, Mediterranean countries, South or Central American countries, Caribbean islands, India, and Saudi Arabia.
What are the two most common ways of measuring the economic status of a household?
An important determinant of the approach you will use to measure socioeconomic status (SES) and subjective social status (SSS) is the level at which you plan to assess its effects — the societal level, the community or neighborhood level, or the individual level. If you are examining how a new policy affected the number of individuals living in poverty, you may look into how many people are living below federal poverty thresholds before and after it takes effect. Researchers interested in how living in a particular neighborhood affects diagnoses of a particular illness may examine the median income of individuals living in that community. Others interested in how SES or SSS affects an individual's mental health may assess occupational prestige or educational attainment.
Percentage of the population living on less than $1.90 per day, the international poverty line, between 10.7% and 12.4%.
Poverty is often linked to a impoverished living environment
Men, who do manual labor are more likely than non manual workers to die from?
Men with physically strenuous jobs may be at a higher risk of early death than men with sedentary jobs. This finding offers new evidence in support of the “physical activity paradox” — the observation from some earlier studies that the health effects of occupational physical activity are different from those of leisure-time physical activity. Regular physical activity is, of course, widely acknowledged as one of cornerstones of a healthy lifestyle. Not getting enough exercise has been linked to dying prematurely from a host of medical problems, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and stroke. U.S. health guidelines recommend that people engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity each week (a goal most American adults fail to meet). Those guidelines do not distinguish, however, between occupational and leisure-time activity.
If you go out for a run for half an hour in your leisure time, that increases your heart rate and you feel well afterwards, But when you are physically active at work, it’s a very different type of activity. You are working for eight hours a day and have limited rest periods. You are lifting, doing repetitive movements, and manual handling. Physically demanding jobs may need to be restructured to allow for the body to recover. They also suggest that people with such jobs may need to make sure they remain physically active during their non-working hours.
Explain the “Big Mac Index”.
The Big Mac Index is an index created by The Economist based on the theory of purchasing power parity (PPP). Over the long-term, PPP theory states that currency exchange rates should equal the price of a basket of goods and services in different countries. And, what better basket of goods than McDonald's Big Mac - or at least its equivalent - in various countries? In theory, the price of a Big Mac reflects a number of local economic factors, ranging from the cost of the ingredients to the cost of local production and advertising. The resulting PPP metric is, therefore considered by many economists to be a reasonable measurement of real-world purchasing power. But investors should remember that there are some important exceptions to the rule.
Explain how immigrants may experience an increase in access to health care when they move from a country with poor health infrastructure.
The growth of migration and population mobility, international trade and communication technologies are shaping global health. The relationships between these globalizing processes and health are introducing health into foreign policy discussions. Migration and mobility feature prominently in this dialogue by addressing the disease risks associated with increasing international population flows. Population mobility encompasses the processes common to evolving patterns of human mobility, whereas migration reflects the legal and administrative aspects of the movement of individuals and groups. Relationships between migration, population mobility and health have long been acknowledged; however, they have received renewed attention due to the emerging and re-emerging infectious disease paradigm that has developed since the 1990s. This attention has been accompanied by requests at the national government and international nongovernmental agency levels for foreign policy initiatives to address aspects of health in the context of migration and population mobility. Governments are now starting to concede the limits of domestic policy as the sole approach to the growing global health challenges of increasing migration. As a result, health issues are being raised more often in foreign policy discussions.
Chapter 4 Socioeconomic Determinants of Health Define the social determinants of health. Select two determinants and...