Determinants of Health Inequity and Significance to Public Health Essay

The move to promote social justice extends that of public health service in what we now deem as eradicating ‘health inequity. ’Contemporary public health has now evolved such that the scope not only covers merely that of sanitation, diet regulation, disease treatment and quarantine/control but also, on the deeper scope, finding roots of the socioeconomic problems associated with morbidity, mortality and the likes and eliminating or targetshooting the cause.

Such resolution would necessitate finding out the fundamental causes of the differential health determinants along the scope of social gradient. Determinants of Health Inequity and Significance to Public Health Essay

Cohort studies on mortality and ‘deprivation’ used to analyze the relation on conditions between populations with different socioeconomic statuses and Chalmers and Capewell (2001) reveals that deprived people die from the same conditions as affluent people but earlier in terms of years or lifespan.

But is deprivation merely a way of reducing the elements of health inequity? Scott (2005) illustrated the “layman” analysis on health inequity in the US. As a first world country, the economic state is considerably well-off compared to other states but there exists disparities in health care which is embedded both in the concurrent social system and the economic and health care policies.

Scott exemplified the ‘disparities’ using three persons from different social strata with heart disease.

It is not known if the ‘personas’ used by Scott were ‘real’ or ‘factual’ but the personas—John Miele (upper class Manhattan architect), Will Wilson (middle class office worker), and Ewa Rycnzac (lower class housekeeper) —do illustrate a window of social ladder and take us deeper into retrospective of the degree of health care accession and social approach these ‘personas’ are receiving. Classes predetermine the fate of health of the members of the state.Determinants of Health Inequity and Significance to Public Health Essay

The differences between accessions of health care are blatant; upper class John would have more chances of being healthy or, on the least, more liable to have the best of health care compared to Wilson and Ewa. Several elements are directly associated with the role of class in the health circumstances, ‘heart attack’, of the three personas: (a) location and accession to the best and afforded health service available; (2) education and income associated to health care accession; and (3) stress based on job types and control(4) social and networking and support of families and relatives.