HLTHAGE 1AA3 Study Guide - Final Guide: Ottawa Charter For Health Promotion, Junk Food, Health Promotion
14 Jul 2018
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Social Determinants of Health
• According to the media, people get sick because they eat too much junk food, spend too much
time on the internet, don’t exercise, and drink alcohol
• Health is structured beyond individual choices
o The choices we are able to make are based on social, economic, cultural, and political
circumstances
• Living conditions shape health more than medical treatments or lifestyle choices
o These conditions are known as the social determinants of health
• Initiatives belonged to 3 approaches – lifestyle, environment, and structure
• Advocacy, community based education, and research can raise awareness about SDOH
• Glaser and Strauss see individuals as:
o Possessing agency
o Questioning authority or expert advice
o Having different health based experiences
• Bury’s work on biographical disruption is important to understand individual experience “… a
chronic illness constituted a disruption, a discontinuance of an ongoing life, a critical situation”
• Hammond conducted a study on older men living with cancer and found:
o Physical decline or “body disruption”
o Seeking to live an active aging lifestyle to the best of their ability
o Death- knew it was coming
o Participants renegotiated their identities to carve out a new meaning of life
Canada’s History with the Social Determinants of Health
• Health Promotion – encouraging people to maintain and improve their personal health through
public campaigns
o Very political approach
o Focuses on how structural factors that create health inequalities can be corrected by
reallocating resources
o Wants to reduce income inequality
• SDOH were first discussed in the 1974 report: A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians
o This report introduced the Health Field Concept – addresses factors of health not in
individual control
▪ Human Biology – biological and physiological aspects of health
▪ Environment – external factors like food safety, pollution, social environment
▪ Lifestyle – decisions made by individuals that influence their health on which
they have control
▪ Health Care Organization – the nature of the health care system (quantity,
quality, arrangement, nature, relationships of people and resources)
• Lifestyle risks – personal decisions and habits that are bad from a health perspective and create
self-imposed risks
o If this results in illness or death, the lifestyle is deemed to have caused this individual’s
suffering
• Health field concept does not explain how the environment (not in individual’s control) impacts
risky decisions
o The government emphasized lifestyle as affecting health more, than the factors
influencing this lifestyle
• The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion – defined health promotion to help increase control and
improve health
