How Society Influences Health

How society influences health

Introduction

The social determinants of health are the social and economic conditions that influence people’s health status. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), social determinants of health are the circumstances in which people are born, grow, live and age, including the health system. These circumstances are the result of the distribution of money, power and resources worldwide, national and local. According to the Social Determinants Commission that is part of WHO, accessibility to health care is essential for equitable health.

Background 

The four components proposed M. Lalonde covers many of the dimensions that can give rise to health problems, or that they can somehow contribute from their combination or participation to produce them. We say many because in this theoretical framework the economic models of one country and other variables such as disease determinants are not included for example

Developing

• Purpose: Promote the acquisition of sufficient knowledge and skills for the cardiologist to be motivated and prepared for

  Develop your usual clinical practice taking into account the determining factors involved in health-disease processes

   

• Determinants: variables, conditions that determine the health level of a community. This concept has been modified through time: from the biologicist conception, an ecological model was passed and finally the concept of health field was raised.

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Health determinants are classified around four major categories: environment, lifestyle, human biology and care services. Environment. Includes all those health -related factors that are external to the human body and on which the person has little or no control. Individuals, by themselves, cannot guarantee the safety or purity of food, cosmetics, devices or water supply, for example. 

Nor is the control of health hazards that represent air and water pollution, nor environmental noise, nor the prevention of adequate dissemination of waste and sewage, nor that the social environment and its rapids changes do not produce harmful effects on health.

Lifestyle. The lifestyle component represents the set of decisions made by the individual with respect to his own health and on which he exercises a certain degree of control. From the point of view of health, bad decisions and harmful personal habits entail risks that originate in the individual himself. When these risks result in disease or death, it can be affirmed that the victim’s lifestyle contributed to it. 

Human biology. It includes all the facts related to health, both physical and mental, which are manifested in the organism as a consequence of the fundamental biology of the human being and the organic constitution of the individual. It includes the genetic inheritance of the person, the processes of maturation and aging, and the different internal devices of the organism, given the complexity of the human body, its biology can have an impact on the health of multiple, varied and serious ways. This element contributes to mortality and a whole range of health problems, such as chronic diseases, genetic disorders, congenital malformations and mental retardation. Health problems whose causes lie in human biology produce unspeakable unfortunates and very high costs for treatment. 

Attention Service. It includes the practice of medicine and nursing, hospitals, nursing homes, medicines, community health care services, ambulances and other health services. This component is defined as a health care system. Great sums of money are usually spent on treating diseases that from the beginning could have been prevented. 

Conclusions 

Health does not depend solely on biological factors or lifestyles but, that exist, multiple conditions and social needs that configure the way of living and getting sick of each sector of society. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a holistic and understanding vision in the design of health policies that take into account the relationships between social determinants and health.

One of the key ways to get to act on health determinants, is to promote that the different sectors responsible for defining policies related to these determinants, incorporate health into their agenda and evaluate the impacts and consequences they may have for health of the population.

Bibliography 

• WHO. Health Promotion Glossary, Geneva 1998. http: // apps.quien.INT/GB/ARCHIVE/PDF_FILES/WHA54/SA548.PDF. Accessed October 2011.
• http: // www.Pah.org/Ecu/Index.PHP?Option = com_content & task = blogcategory & id = 704 & itemid = 348 
• World Health Organization. "Social Determinants of Health". [On-line].; 2013 [Case 07 October 2013]. Available at: http: // www.quien.Int/social_determinants/es/.
• WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, 2008

  Pan American Health Organization. Instrument for the measurement of performance of essential public health functions. Public health in the Americas. Preliminary document, October 2000