Health is one of the most important things for people to have. A healthy workforce is more productive, a healthy school population is better able to master lessons, and a healthy community is more capable of making progress toward societal goals. Health is also a fundamental concept for individuals, and how they think about it can influence their lives.
How we think about health influences what actions we take to improve it. For example, if we equate health with the absence of disease or disability, then our actions might be limited to preventing and treating those conditions. A more comprehensive view, however, would require addressing the social and economic conditions that are related to health.
A third way to define health is as a balance in adapting to life demands. This definition invites new ways to assess resiliency and resources for adaptation, and it places a higher value on the need to be in harmony with both personal and community values.
The social determinants of health are the conditions in which we are born, live, work, learn, play, worship, and age, including housing, education, the environment, income, jobs, and more. These factors are closely tied to many health outcomes and risk factors, and they contribute to wide disparities in health, functioning, and quality of life. They are often called the “upstream” causes of health and are influenced by multiple forces, including the genetic endowment that we are born with.
About the Author
