Reducing Health Inequities - Article Example

HEALTH INEQUITIES A person’s health is very vital not just to the person’s self but also to the society and industry that the person is a part of. If the members of the society or the organization are considered as unhealthy, there are numerous possibilities that can occur as to the order and serenity of the institution. Another circumstance is that if a member or members of the workforce of a certain industry is unhealthy, the output and chain of operation of the workplace will be affected. There might be back-up plans to minimize the effects yet there are times when these contingencies are not sufficient to fill-up the gap left by the person or people tagged as unhealthy. Government, non-government and private organizations have been trying to determine what factor should be prioritized to achieve better health within a population. Three written analyses that were published were studied. The said works were aimed to identify the factor which affects health more compared to others. However, the 3 published materials failed to conclude on the same factor thus further making things complicated as to which truly affects health more. These texts that are being pertained to are Matthias Braubach’s Key Challenges of Housing and Health from WHO Perspective (2011), Fran Baum’s From Norm to Eric: Avoiding Lifestyle Drift in Australian Health Policy (2011) and, Amir Attaran and colleague’s Healthy by Law: The Missed Opportunity to Use Laws for Public Health (2011). Key Challenges of Housing and Health from WHO Perspective Matthias Braubach’s article was published in the September 6, 2011 issue of the International Journal of Public Health. In the said paper, the author used housing as the main factor to consider for the health of a person and the society. The author did not just use his own perspective and opinion towards to what factor or factors need to be considered to achieve better health. Braubach used the perspective of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) as the basis for his article. According to the author: “Without doubt, housing and health has received increasing interest by the public health community in recent years, and is now considered one of the major environmental, as well as social determinants of population health (2011, p. 579).” It is not a confidential fact that the housing category of a person or a family plays a major role in their health status. As Braubach expressed in the article that there is a negative effect on a person’s health when there are unlikely entities present in the environment of the household. There is a big chance that the condition of the household plays a major effect on a person’s health as the house could be invaded by bacteria and viruses which are not visible to the naked eye. These can cause numerous ailments that can affect the performance of a person whether it will be in socializing to other people in the society or how the person will perform at the workplace. Such organisms are unavoidable in the household as though the house itself might be disinfected yet the surrounding might not be or the other way around. From Norm to Eric: Avoiding Lifestyle Drift in Australian Health Policy On the other hand, considering the article of Fran Baum, it is the person’s physical body that should be taken into consideration and not the environment. Baum therefore is contradicting the idea of Braubach that it is the household which plays a major effect in the status of a person’s health (Braubach, 2011, p. 579). It is not saying that the housing condition does not affect a person’s health. Baum is just contradicting the idea of Braubach that the housing is not the one which should be given primary attention yet it should be the lifestyle of the person that should be given initial attention and action before anything else (Baum, 2011, p. 404). According to Baum (2011, p. 405): “The idea of people wanting to live longer and healthier and so responding to lifestyle messages and adopting smoke-free, moderate alcohol, low-fat and sugar, and active lifestyles has a ring of truth to it. The problem, however, is that there is a paucity of evidence to suggest that telling people to change their lifestyle to be more healthy works”. With such statement by the author, it is being pointed out that the status of a person’s health is directly related to the lifestyle that the person practices. It is not anybody’s fault that a person’s well-being is in jeopardy but his own. Every person is responsible for his own health status. There is no other person to blame for the slow destruction of a person’s physical body but himself. There is nothing that the government and other organizations can do if the person himself would not take into consideration his own physical well-being. Households can be disinfected and neighborhoods can do clean-ups every once in a while however if it is the person’s body has been damaged to the extent that it cannot be healed, its surroundings cannot do anything to improve the physical health (Baum, 2011, p. 404-5). If there is something that should be prioritized, it should start within the person himself and then it will radiate or influence its surroundings. Healthy by Law: The Missed Opportunity to Use Laws for Public Health Amir Attaran et al. also contradicted the ideas of the first 2 articles which have been previously indicated and discussed. It has been stated in their article published in 2011 (p. 283) that: “Health is the result of biological and social determinants; both are important. Nature dictates the laws for biological determinants; people create the laws for social determinants. Nature’s laws are hard to discover and are eternal whether or not they suit humanity; people’s laws are easily written and can be changed at anytime to suit humanity better. So why is it that the public health community, which expends much effort and expense probing natural laws, places negligible emphasis on collection, analysis, and making greater use of the world’s public health laws?” The statement that was given by Attaran et al. (2011, pp. 283-4) in a way complemented the idea of Braubach. It may not have completely agreed with all the ideas presented by the latter author, however the article that was published in TheLancet.Com somewhat saw things in the same perspective as it is the surroundings of the person which can indicate the status of a person’s health. With vast reasons and factors present in the world, there is not a single particular factor that can be considered solely responsible for the status of the well-being of a person. In terms of the factors that have been pointed out, none can be considered as wrong and nothing is considered as the absolute right one. All factors present can be and should be considered to ensure better health for people who deserve every right to be in good physical shape regardless of social stature, race and nationality. Bibliography Attaran, A., Pang, T., Whitworth, J., Oxman, A. and McKee, M. (2011) Health by Law: The Missed Opportunity to Use Laws for Public Health. The Lancet. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60069-X. [accessed 19 March 2012]. Baum, F. (2011) From Norm to Eric: Avoiding Lifestyle Drift in Australian Health Policy. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 35(5), pp. 404-406. Braubach, M. (2011) Key Challenges of Housing and Health from WHO Perspective. International Journal of Public Health, 56, pp. 579-580. Read More