Determinants of health

Five Determinants of Health The scientific community neatly categorizes various factors affecting our Health into 5 groups – To improve something one has to learn how it works. And to learn how it works one has to take it apart, study the parts and then put them back together. Only then can one make meaningful suggestions to improve it. My training as an engineer was looking for an anchor, a starting point. My ‘discovery’ of the 5 determinants gave me a starting point to learn more. To pry the health puzzle apart. And then take a step back to see what we could do to improve health outcomes. This finding raised many questions. Questions like what ‘factors’ makes up these 5 determinants? Which of these factors can be ‘influenced’ in order to improve our health – individually and collectively? How? Influencing which ones will have a larger impact on health – give us a better ROI? Are we doing anything today to influence these factors? What are we doing? I decided to take a deeper dive. Let me start with the first question. What are these 5 Determinants? What makes up these 5 determinants of health – Genetics, Behavior, So­cial Circumstances, Environmental and Physi­cal influences, and Medical Care? At a seventy thousand foot level, there are definitions provided by CDC defines and at Genetics (and Biology) Genetics – courtesy Pixabay More than anything else, our health is defined by who we are, male or female, our age, any predispositions wired in our genetic code, things lik...

Key facts • Commercial determinants of health are the private sector activities that affect people’s health, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively. • The private sector influences the social, physical and cultural environments through business actions and societal engagements; for example, supply chains, labour conditions, product design and packaging, research funding, lobbying, preference shaping and others. • Commercial determinants of health impact a wide range of risk factors, including smoking, air pollution, alcohol use, obesity and physical inactivity, and health outcomes, such as noncommunicable diseases, communicable diseases and epidemics, injuries on roads and from weapons, violence, and mental health conditions. • Commercial determinants of health affect everyone, but young people are especially at risk, and unhealthy commodities worsen pre-existing economic, social and racial inequities. Certain countries and regions, such as Small Island Developing States and low- and middle-income countries, face greater pressure from transnational actors. • There are effective public health actions to respond to these determinants, which are key to building back better after COVID-19. Overview The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, the systems put in place to deal with illness, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. These forces and systems include economic ...

Starting in the early 2000s, the World Health Organization facilitated the academic and political work on social determinants in a way that provided a deep understanding of health disparities in a global perspective. [ citation needed] In 2003, the In 2008, the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health published a report entitled "Closing the Gap in a Generation", which aimed to understand, from a social justice perspective, how health inequity could be remedied, and what actions could combat factors that exacerbated injustices. The 2010 The 2011 World Conference on Social Determinants of Health, in which 125 delegations participated, created the Rio Political Declaration on Social Determinants of Health. Commonly accepted social determinants [ ] The United States According to a report by the A commonly used model that illustrate the relationship between biological, individual, community, and societal determinants is Whitehead and Dahlgren's model originally presented in 1991 and has been adapted by the CDC. [ citation needed] In Canada, these social determinants of health have gained wide usage: The list of social determinants of health can be much longer. A recently published article identified several other social determinants . Gender [ ] Differences in Health disparities are defined as "preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations". Econom...