Social Determinants Of Health Care Literature Review

In the article by A. Driscoll and N. G. Nagel, they explain how poverty affects children and parents. The authors show that children who live in poverty have a risk level to die before their first birthday. As well they show how it affects children in their education because their level of learning is much lower than others, who do not live in poverty. Parents are focused on their jobs, forgetting their children because the money they earn is not enough to support the family and they have to look for more than one job in order to survive, and nevertheless, having two jobs is not enough to be able to give their children a good education. Therefore, those children develop behaviors that are not appropriate, and consequently acquire a low level

The social determinants of health impact both chronic physical conditions and mental health. Key aspects of prevention include increasing physical activity, access to nutritious foods, ensuring adequate income and fostering social inclusion and social support. This creates opportunities to enhance protective factors and reduce risk factors related to aspects of mental and physical

This implies that disparities in health continue to exist despite the efforts of the health care systems to provide patients similar access to care, which according to Woolf, and Braveman (2011), suggests that disparities originate outside the formal health care setting. The authors concluded that environmental and social variables especially income and education are often the underlying causes of illnesses and are key to understanding health

Epidemiologists have known that poverty is interrelated with higher morbidity and mortality rates. Recent research has suggested a positive

The economic inequality is explained by the childrens’ realization of their economic status, The

  Commission on Social Determinants of Health.  Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health; final report of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health.  Geneva: World Health

This essay aims to identify and evaluate the inequalities in health care in different areas of society, namely disability and gender. Firstly, it is important to understand what we mean by health inequalities. It is commonly understood that health inequality refers to unjust differences in the health status, usually preventable, between different groups, populations or individuals. The existence of such inequalities is attributed to the unequal distributions of social, environmental and economic conditions within societies. Such conditions determine the risk of individuals getting ill, their ability to prevent sickness, as well as opportunities to access to the right treatments.

Poverty puts extreme psychological stress on the minds of developing children leading to mental health cases that could be prevented. BJPsych Advances, a worldwide regarded medical research site states, “...income inequality produces psychological stress, which leads to deteriorating health and high mortality over time.” The stress of dealing with economic inequality impacts the health of low-income families. As stated by Online Database Issues and Controversies, “Children of poverty risks long-lasting damage to their brain… ultimately limits their ability to transcend their impoverished background.” The youth are becoming incapable of overcoming poverty and the widening social inequality continues to fall further behind the advances of the upper class.

Under this criteria, top health priorates included lack of effective and accessible services, lack of water and sanitation, and high rates of poverty leading to poor living and working conditions. This criteria addresses the crucial social and environment factors that are often not address by other criteria such as top cause of mortality. This type of criteria draws out the social inequalities and inequities of the health system and the multiple and complex social systems that often contribute to adverse health effects for those who are disadvantaged by socioeconomic factors such as poverty and poor living conditions (Moyer et al.,2014). Many of these factors have substainal implications for health with many developing health conditions due to their environment and inability to afford to better the situation (Moyer et al.,2014). Many do not have access to clean water or improved sanitation facilities with only 15% having access in 2015 (WHO,2018).

In chapter 7 we read about social class and health inequalities and how the different types of social class have an impact on one in our society. In this chapter, we discussed and focused on many important topics such as social class, social structure, and socio-economic status. Readers gained a better knowledge on those topics and how it relates to health inequalities. One new fact I learned after reading this chapter is how an individual who has a good education and well-paying job can live longer when compared to one who doesn’t. This chapter once again like many other chapters read before in this course, talked about the inequalities between the rich and the poor.

Longer life expectancies are linked with a well-developed medical system and access to resources such as clean water and food. Finally, when a country’s per capita gross domestic product is high, the better off their standards of living tend to be generally. Additionally, the dependency ratio, infant mortality rate, total fertility rate, number of AIDS deaths per year, and population growth rates are

Policy-makers can cooperate with a range of organizations, health practitioners, and government departments at all levels in order to develop health policy that seeks to reduce health inequalities effectively before they can manifest themselves in poor health outcomes. The medical model – while it will always be around, and while it arguably should always be around – is somewhat of a quick-fix, short-term approach to a very serious and pervasive public health issue. The social-ecological model, though, is a much more forward thinking, long-term, and sustainable approach to dealing with this public health issue. It looks to the root causes of the issue – all of the social and economic determinants of health discussed in part 1 – and attempts to solve the problem at that level. This approach is far more useful for reducing health inequalities.

Social causation of disease is described as the origin of illness that results from social environment, social interactions, or social factors. On the other hand, biological factors are not the only cause of disease as social causation and presume that social factors such as socioeconomic status (SES), religion, and social networks have an effect on the severity of illness and mortality. The idea that social interaction and culture play a major role in the causation of disease has been present in social thought since the discussion of the interaction between politics and mortality. Social causes of disease can be divided into fundamental causes and proximate lifestyle causes ( Link & Phelan, 1995). Nevertheless, causes of illness can directly

Low income families do not just get the title “poverty” branded onto them, but they have much more negative effects attached to the label. These families in the bottom third of the income group suffer immensely and this does not solely affect the family as a whole, but it affects each and every individual included. After several readings about how these families are affected, it is important to point out that children are the most unfortunate because of long-term damages. The long-term effects of children in low income families include developmental, psychological and emotional effects.

Furthermore, some findings highlight that is not possible to generalize pattern in socioeconomic inequalities in mortality and self-reported measurements of health (Mackenbach et al., 2008). This suggests that performances of the welfare may have been hidden behind different indicators of health used in the analysis. Therefore, in order to understand whether welfare state may ameliorate the socioeconomic inequality in health is necessary to take into account different aspect of