What are the social determinants of health and how are they related to health inequalities?
/This article was featured in the SCDC Weekly - 18th September 2024.
As recent evidence continues to highlight Scotland’s persistent and rising health inequalities, it’s important to understand the causes of these systematic and avoidable differences in health outcomes across our population.
In a new resource, CHEX has explored how social and economic factors, our physical environment and the ability of our health services to respond, all contribute greatly to these inequalities.
The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, as well as the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. These forces and systems include economic policies and systems, social and cultural factors, environmental effects and political systems.
These factors greatly influence people’s health, far more than any individual lifestyle choices such as alcohol consumption, diet, smoking or any other factor that people can control.
People living in poorer communities can be subject to a ‘double effect’: already living in overall worse social, economic and environmental conditions, they can face challenges and barriers when making individual health choices too – for example food insecurity or lack of safe outdoor space for walking and exercise.
A community-led approach to health follows the social model of health, linking our health and wellbeing to the world around us, including our work, education, housing, leisure and to the way we organise ourselves as a society.
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