Social Determinants Of Health: The Non-Medical Factors Affecting One’s Health

Social determinants can be described as the non-medical factors playing a role in one’s health outcomes. These factors are the circumstances that include conditions in which a person is born, works, grows, lives, and ages that impact the person’s daily life situation.

SDOH (Social Determinants Of Health) are either social or economic circumstances. They are classified under five primary determinants like education, economic stability, community and social and context, neighbourhood and built environment, and health and health care.

Confronting social determinants of health is imperative for decreasing health inequities and enhancing health. These determinants are significant not only for raising general health but also for eradicating health inequities that are usually found in economic and social downsides.

Some examples of Social Determinants of Health are as follows:

• Education.
• Income and Social Protection.
• Housing, basic amenities and the environment.
• Early Childhood Development.
• Food insecurity.
• Social inclusion and non-discrimination.
• Access to affordable health services of decent quality.
• Unemployment and job insecurity.
• Working life conditions.
• Structural conflict.

To foster health equity solutions and tackle issues like food insecurity, several leading pharmaceutical companies like Roche, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Novartis, and many more are collaborating and working towards the realization of these goals. Furthermore, to address SDOH issues like transportation obstacles and food insecurity, companies like Blue Cross of North Carolina, OneCity Health, CVS, and many others have produced innovative collaborations.

SDOH screening tools are utilized to better perceive the obstacles to care and the unmet social needs that people have been facing. Some of these tools include:

• Social Determinants Screening Tool.
• Self-Sufficiency Outcomes Matrix.
• Social Needs Assessment.
• PRAPARE Tool.
• Community Paramedicine Pilot Health Assessment.

Integrating SDOH into attempts to decrease health and healthcare inequalities can be the key to cutting down on global disease. For this, it is necessary to construct an interdisciplinary team consisting of the WHO, the NIH, the CDC, sociologists, governments, researchers, health care professionals, anthropologists, public health professionals, and everyone else capable of adding to the general understanding and analysis of various factors that influence health inequalities in populations undergoing socio ecosystem challenges.

From the article: How the social determinants of health impacted COVID-19 pandemic? — By Delveinsight.