Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769

Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

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2007 - 20102

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Author: search.filters.author.Irwin, Alec

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    A Conceptual Framework for Action on the Social Determinants of Health
    (WHO Document Production Services, 2010) Solar, Orielle; Irwin, Alec
    Conceptual frameworks in a public health context shall in the best of worlds serve two equally important purposes: guide empirical work to enhance our understanding of determinants and mechanisms and guide policy-making to illuminate entry points for interventions and policies. Effects of social determinants on population health and on health inequalities are characterized by working through long causal chains of mediating factors. Many of these factors tend to cluster among individuals living in underprivileged conditions and to interact with each other. Epidemiology and biostatistics are therefore facing several new challenges of how to estimate these mechanisms. The Commission on Social Determinants of Health made it perfectly clear that policies for health equity involve very different sectors with very different core tasks and very different scientific traditions. Policies for education, labour market, traffic and agriculture are not primarily put in place for health purposes. Conceptual frameworks shall not only make it clear which types of actions are needed to enhance their “side effects” on health, but also do it in such a way that these sectors with different scientific traditions find it relevant and useful. This paper pursues an excellent and comprehensive discussion of conceptual frameworks for science and policy for health equity, and in so doing, takes the issue a long way further.
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    A Conceptual Framework for Action on the Social Determinants of Health
    (2007) Solar, Orielle; Irwin, Alec
    When he announced his intention to create the Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), WHO Director-General Lee Jong-wook identified the Commission as part of a comprehensive effort to promote greater equity in global health, in a spirit of social justice1. The Commission’s goal, then, is to advance health equity, driving action to reduce health differences among social groups, within and between countries. Getting to grips with this mission requires finding answers to three fundamental problems: 1. Where do health differences among social groups originate, if we trace them back to their deepest roots? 2. What pathways lead from root causes to the stark differences in health status observed at the population level? 3. In light of the answers to the first two questions, where and how should we intervene to reduce health inequities? This paper seeks to make explicit a shared understanding of these issues that can orient the work of the CSDH.