China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
The public in public health
Published in Sridhar Venkatapuram, Alex Broadbent, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Public Health, 2023
This brings us into the terrain of social epidemiology and the social determinants of health. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines these very broadly: The social determinants of health (SDH) are the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. These forces and systems include economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies and political systems.The SDH have an important influence on health inequities—the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries. In countries at all levels of income, health and illness follow a social gradient: the lower the socioeconomic position, the worse the health.(World Health Organization, n.d.)
Public Health as a Social Choice
Published in Rui Nunes, Healthcare as a Universal Human Right, 2022
The state of a population’s health is deeply influenced by economic, social, political, and therefore, cultural factors. That is, social factors create and shape the patterns of health and disease. This principle of social epidemiology necessitates the adoption of clear public health measures, particularly in education, basic sanitation, infectious disease control, and social protection mechanisms, among others. If concerted, these effectors can have a decisive, positive impact on the quality of life, disease prevention, and life expectancy; that is, overall gains in health.
Consider the Social History in Your Assessment
Published in Scott A. Simpson, Anna K. McDowell, The Clinical Interview, 2019
Social epidemiology is the study of how a person’s environment affects physical and psychological health.1 Sociocultural factors, including community-level factors, influence health in significant ways. For example, medication adherence, blood sugar testing, and cholesterol of patients with diabetes have significant relationships with neighborhood factors including food insecurity, social support, and neighborhood violence.2 Forgoing social history leads the clinician to miss important elements influencing the patient, their health, their interactions with the clinician, and their approach to treatment.
Revisiting social MPE: an integration of molecular pathological epidemiology and social science in the new era of precision medicine
Published in Expert Review of Molecular Diagnostics, 2021
Jin Dai, Akihiro Nishi, Nathan Tran, Yasumasa Yamamoto, George Dewey, Tomotaka Ugai, Shuji Ogino
Social science is a discipline that studies societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies [48]. Social science (e.g. sociology) and its health-related interdisciplinary areas (social epidemiology) have also expanded significantly and concurrently with the booming development of MPE [49,50]. Social-demographic factors such as socioeconomic status/position, income inequality, social support and capital, neighborhood quality, gender, and race/ethnicity can influence lifestyle and other exposure status of individuals and therefore determine human health [49,51]. As an interdisciplinary area of social science and epidemiology, social epidemiology is concerned with the way that social structures, institutions, and relationships influence health [52]. Social epidemiology is a method-based subject, which has sometimes adapted theories and analytical strategies from other fields of social science to cast light on population health-related questions [50,53–59]. One crucial goal of social epidemiology is to understand the biological mechanism of the interested social risk factors upon population health outcomes [52].
The Nexus of Social Progress and Economic Inequality: Implications for the Grand Challenges for Social Work
Published in Smith College Studies in Social Work, 2020
The Grand Challenges initiative has included the development of concept papers for each of the 12 challenges (GCSW-Concept, 2020). Several of these papers do identify some key policies and programs that are needed for each challenge, but rarely associated social work practices. There is a sparsity of proposals in many of them, and when present, they are only vaguely described. A key need, if the initiative is to be successful, is for each Challenge subgroup to identify and develop sufficiently specified and innovative policy, programmatic, and practice ideas for development and possibly for promotion. Furthermore, each group needs to clearly identify needed research for the major research funders to incorporate into their funding criteria. These may involve the underlying social problems through studies of their social epidemiology, origins, and dynamics, or, applied studies on the policies and programs meant to address them. Systematic reviews and metaanalyses, specific to each of the Grand Challenges, need to be either identified or completed. Such operationalization of each challenge may be an essential requirement for avoiding the marginalization of the initiative within social work and by the larger professional communities.
Conceptualizing ethnicity in alcohol and drug research: Epidemiology meets social theory
Published in Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse, 2018
Geoffrey Hunt, Torsten Kolind, Tamar Antin
This trajectory in alcohol and drug research is unfortunate considering recent debates in social epidemiology about the importance of examining health disparities within a framework that considers “social structures and social dynamics that encompass individuals” (Wemrell, Merlo, Mulinari, & Hornborg, 2016, p. 155; see also Krieger, 2000; Ng & Muntaner, 2014). Social epidemiologists have argued that mainstream research tends “to focus on the body, lifestyle, behaviour, sex/gender, race/ethnicity and perhaps the personality, emotional state or socioeconomic status of the single person” (Wemrell et al., 2016, p. 154). Just as mainstream epidemiology has been criticized for having little regard for social structures, social dynamics, and social theory (De Kock, Decorte, Vanderplasschen, Derluyn, & Sacco, 2017), most existing studies of ethnicity within drug and alcohol research can similarly be critiqued for failing to adopt a structural approach as well as for neglecting contemporary social science theories of and debates about ethnicity.