Mental Health and Illness - Assignment Example

Running Head: Mental Health; Access to Health Services. Department One objective of the Healthy People 2020 isimproving access to health services. The goal of this objective to attain a situation where Americans can access comprehensive and quality healthcare as this is crucial in ensuring equity when it comes to health services. Access to quality healthcare also translates into improved life quality for all Americans. The objective comprises of four major objectives i.e. increasing health insurance coverage, improving the quality of services for all patients, reducing the time it takes for someone to access service and increasing the number of PCPs (Healthy People 2020, 2015) According to (Coreil, 2010), there are five levels of determinants influencing access to and uptake of health care services.

These include intrapersonal factors, interpersonal ones, organisational issues, the community and society. Community level factors include the environment, availability of public facilities, socio-economic, class and issues of ethnicity. They affect the way a particular community is able to access health services e.g. mental health. The society on the other hand influences health outcomes through policy, ethos of the nation, infrastructural considerations, cultural value systems, educational achievements and economics.

There are macro-level factors and therefore affect healthcare access at the national level. Intrapersonal level determinants of health include personality, heredity, and cognition. Heredity can predispose individuals to mental health while personality and cognition affect their decisions on health issues. An individual’s home, family background and peer group influence comprise make interpersonal health determinants. Interpersonal level factors may influence ones perception of mental health and hence influence access.

The organisational issues are schooling, membership to civic groups and factors to do with healthcare organisations. Presence of healthcare organisations for instance increase chances of access to services while membership to civic organisations increase ones information about available healthcare services. In my opinion the most important factors that will influence achievement of the HP2020 objective of increasing access to health care the societal level determinants of health. This is policies are formulated at this level as well as the funding for such noble objectives.

Cultural values systems and infrastructural considerations all of which fall under the society level factors influencing health are also important in determining access to healthcare. References1. Chiao, J. & Blizinsky, K. (2013). Population Disparities in Mental Health: Insights From Cultural Neuroscience. American Journal of Public Health, 103(S1), S122-S1322. Coreil, J. (2010). Social and behavioral foundations of public health (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications3. Healthy People 2020. (2015). Access to Health Services.

Available at: http://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/Access-to-Health-Services 4. Patel, V., Flisher, A., Hetrick, S., & McGorry, P. (2007). Mental health of young people: A global public health challenge. The Lancet, 369(9569), 1302-13.