HEALTH CARE DETERMINANTS

Health Care Determinants

Health Care Determinants

Introduction

Determinants of health have equal importance to all Peoples. The impact of a serious mental illness complicates health status well beyond the symptoms and treatment of the illness, and it does so for both the person directly afflicted by a serious mental illness and his or her natural sources of support (Torres-Cantero et.al 2007). The inability to recognize the signs of an illness, late intervention, lost opportunity, and discrimination are barriers to optimizing some of the other determinants of health. A population health approach recognizes that any analysis of the health of the population must extend beyond an assessment of traditional health status indicators like death, disease and disability. A population health approach establishes indicators related to mental and social well-being, quality of life, life satisfaction, income, employment and working conditions, education and other factors known to influence health.

The People Mental Health Association/Peel Branch focuses on some of these determinants with clients by offering support in the areas of employment, housing, income, education, personal health practices, social support, and access to services. Each element is recognized in the Framework for Support, the context for CMHA/Peel's approach to helping clients achieve recovery.

Many factors combine together to affect the health of individuals and communities. Whether people are healthy or not, is determined by their circumstances and environment. To a large extent, factors such as where we live, the state of our environment, genetics, our income and education level, and our relationships with friends and family all have considerable impacts on health, whereas the more commonly considered factors such as access and use of health care services often have less of an impact. The determinants of health include:

the social and economic environment,

the physical environment, and

the person's individual characteristics and behaviours.

The context of people's lives determines their health, and so blaming individuals for having poor health or crediting them for good health is inappropriate (Ku Matani 2001).

The Public Health Agency of Canada cites on their web site that they've learned a lot in the past several decades about what determines health and where they should be concentrating their efforts (Eshiett Parry 2003). Much of the research is telling them that they need to look at the big picture to examine factors both inside and outside the health care system that affect everyone's health. At every stage of life, health is determined by complex interactions between social and economic factors, the physical environment, and individual behaviour. These factors are referred to as “determinants of health”. They do not exist in isolation from each other. It is the combined influence of the determinants of health that determines health status.

Key determinants of health are listed as:

Income and Social Status

Social Support Networks

Education and Literacy

Employment/Working Conditions

Social Environments

Physical Environments

Personal Health Practices and Coping Skills

Healthy Child Development

Biology and Genetic Endowment

Health Services

Gender

Culture

The challenge the Public Health Agency of Canada faces is how to use what's known about the determinants of health to:

focus the research agenda so they can increase their understanding of how the basic determinants ...