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New Canadian Report Says Health Inequalities Are A Matter Of Fairness And Justice And Calls For Action

“Key Health Inequalities in Canada: A National Portrait” is a new collaborative report by several agencies and groups which has found that the “persistence, breadth, and depth of health inequalities in Canada constitute a call to action across all levels and sectors of society.”

Armed with such a broad and far reaching conclusion, the report outlines several recommended strategies for addressing the topic. These strategies rely heavily on the work of the World Health Organization over the past few years devoted to a better understanding of the social determinants of health and providing a framework for addressing them.

The “principles for action” and “promising practices” highlighted in the report are included below along with explanatory excerpts that expand on the statements in bold.

Recommended Strategies

Adopt a human rights approach to action on the social determinants of health and health equity. 

A human rights approach recognizes that equitable access to opportunities for health, well-being, and their determinants is an issue of fairness and justice.

Intervene across the life course with evidence-informed policies and culturally safe health and social services. 

Interventions at different life stages, particularly during critical or sensitive periods (e.g. early years) can substantially affect health outcomes and health equity.

Intervene on both proximal (downstream) and distal (upstream) determinants of health and health equity. 

Public health actions that focus on individual-level behavioral determinants may inadvertently increase health inequalities in the absence of accompanying efforts that target "upstream" socioeconomic, political, cultural, and environmental factors.

Deploy a combination of targeted interventions and universal policies/interventions. 

Pairing targeted and universal interventions helps ensure that the targeted intervention effects are not "washed out" by broader conditions that may sustain social inequalities.

Address both material contexts and sociocultural processes of power, privilege, and exclusion.

Effective action on health equity must also include efforts to empower disadvantaged communities and tackle the harmful processes of marginalization and exclusion (e.g. systemic discrimination and stigmatization) embedded in hierarchies of power and privilege.

Implement a "Health in All Policies" approach. 

Many of the policy levers that influence the social determinants of health lie outside of the health sector and can only be addressed through collaborative engagement with others.

Carry out ongoing monitoring and evaluation. 

Ongoing monitoring and reporting on the magnitude and trends of health inequalities and their determinants supports public actors in evaluating their progress.

Conclusion

According to the report’s conclusion, “…achieving the goal of health equity demands that we acknowledge our interdependence-our shared responsibility to create and sustain healthful living and working conditions and environments, and the shared benefits that we can all enjoy when those conditions are in place.”

To read the full report, visit:  https://bit.ly/2LWyel3  ■


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