The Canadian Social Determinants of Health: A Canadian Perspective Is Aimed at Fosterin

The Canadian Social Determinants of Health: A Canadian Perspective is aimed at fosterin

g communication between the people concerned with the state of the several determinants of health, as well as those who are knowledgeable about the health effects. This contributed to increased diffusion of the social determinants of health concept into the discussion of some important issues. It led to the increased awareness on health-related effects of continuing income, food insecurity, and housing; lack of child care, inadequate health and social services, and other social determinants of health in a wide range of reports, documents, and related advocacy efforts. Yet, despite the increased discussions of social determinants of health, there is very little to show concerning its effects upon the creation of public policy in Canada. There is little, if any, evidence to show that policy makers think about these concepts at all and other relevant research findings when creating a health-promoting public policy (Gelbach & Pritchett, 2002). Besides, media coverage of health issues continues to be dominated by behavioral and biomedical approaches and usually, public understanding about the social determinants of health reflects these preoccupations.

But what exactly are the determinants of health? The term has gone out of the attempt of researchers in order to understand the exposure that members of different socio-economic groups experienced varying health outcomes, as well as the special means and factors by which these elements led to sickness. The term made a debut in 1996 and its relevance was indicated by the attempts to understand how nations experiences varying population health. The researcher used the illustration of the difference in health between Americans and the citizens from most other industrialized countries. The latter had greater life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and lower number of childhood deaths as a result of injury, regardless of the overall great wealth in the US. The study was enlarged by the researchers’ desire to understand whether social determinants of health differences within nations could be used to explain the differences among populations. Another reason was to figure out why nations would differ so much in terms of the social determinants of health quality that is experienced by citizens (Gelbach & Pritchett, 2002). The purpose of this paper is to answer these questions and use them to understand the current concepts of the social determinants of health.

The intention of the social determinants of health is to improve the health of the Canadians. From a general stand point, the explanations from citizens indicated improvement in the Canadians health status in the last 100 years, differences in the general health status between Canada and other nations, and persistent difference in health status among the Canadians themselves. Evidence indicates that the

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