During the past few years, the health community and public sector has been drawn upon the attention towards social determinants of health. This social determinants of health circle evolves around the factors except those belonging to medical care that can be influenced by shaping health and influencing social policies in much powerful ways. According to World Health Organization, social determinants of health is defined as “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age” (SLAWOMIRSKI, 2006). Social determinants induces the health related factors coupled with socioeconomic factors like education, income, unemployment and wealth. The social determinants of health are responsible for health inequalities. The essay is a broad …show more content…
Pakistan is a signatory to the Alma Ata Agreement that sets the Millennium Development Goals (Ministry of Planning of Pakistan, 2012). However, health conditions are affected by many social determinants and underlying inequalities in the society. Lack of clean water, housing, adequate nutrition, sanitary conditions, education, unequal distribution of income and gender inequalities are associated with low economic development and bad health conditions.
Education and its proper distribution is being featured as the major factor in the population’s health and epidemiology. Education makes the public aware of basic sanitation and hygiene and decreases the chances of an individual to get sick. A good educational structure can allow the users to undertake regular health checkups by making them aware of the importance of regular health scrutiny (Sabates & Feinstein, 2006). Education helps in enhancing the demand for preventative health services as
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It is related to health in three ways i.e. through gross national product of the country, income of individuals and income inequality between rich and poor among geographic areas. The inequality between poor and rich gives rise to bad health conditions. According to Marmot (2010), for Canadian middle income group ($30,000-$50,000) the mortality rate was 1.6 times of the top income group. Similarly another study done by Deaton (2002) showed the increase in probability of dying with the decreasing income levels. Not only income, but egalitarian distribution of income is mandatory for attaining better health environment. Pakistan lies in those countries that have highly skewed income distribution with higher rate of poverty which reduces per capita consumption of the poor. Number of hungry people and malnourishment has increased in Pakistan due to income inequality. In case of Pakistan, the unequal income distribution worsens the health of public by increasing infant mortality rate and by reducing the life expectancy rate. The Gini coefficient of Pakistan (measure of income inequality within a society) is 30 (a value of 0 means perfect equality and a value of 100 means perfect inequality) (Ministry of Planning of Pakistan, 2012).
Housing, lack of clean water and poor sanitation are also an indicator of healthier society. The figure below shows that the most prevalent