Category: Analysis
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The Political Determinants of Health Inequity – Another End of the World is Possible
By Remco van de Pas Ten years ago, The Lancet-University of Oslo Commission on Global Governance for Health released a report on the political origins of health inequity. (Ottersen et, al., 2014) The independent academic commission was formed in 2011. It was initiated by The Lancet and the Ministry of Health in Norway to examine…
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Health differentials associated with social inequality: description, explanation and strategy
The focus of this post is on the different uses of ‘social determinants’ and ‘social determination’ in describing, explaining and responding to the health differentials associated with social inequality. Background The level of health that a population can achieve is a function of their exposure to risk, their access to resources, and the distribution of…
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Class
Usage The term ‘class’ is used for widely different purposes. Researchers whose purpose is primarily descriptive (eg demographers or statisticians) tend to treat ‘class’ as a descriptive variable, often closely linked to household income or wealth. A spectrum from very rich to very poor is defined and the numbers and circumstances of households at different…
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Alienation
Usage This post explores the usefulness of alienation theory in bridging between the insights of political economy and the concerns of public health (Crinson and Yuill 2008). Alienation is not a real thing, out there; it is a conceptual framework for making sense of human experience. The term comes to contemporary usage from Roman law…
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Neoliberalism
Usages The term, ‘neoliberalism’, is required to carry a wide range of meanings; variously an ideological project, a political program, or an institutional configuration of governance (England and Ward 2007) Bell and Green (2016) comment that “When a concept can be used to describe such an extraordinary – and even downright contradictory – array of…
