Social Determinants Of Health: A Case Study

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Adam Smith an 18th century economist and philosopher once remarked, “ The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations”. Over 1.3 billion people today live on a dollar a day or less, yet due to its interconnectedness, multidimensionality, and wide ranging relativity, the condition of poverty remains nearly indefinable (Birdsall & Londoño,1997, p. 32). For the sake of this paper, poverty will defined as: A situation in which the level of living of an individual, family, or group is below the standard of the community (PAHO 2014). Often times, because of its complexity, individuals examine poverty through its influences known as the Social Determinants of Health (SDH): “The complex, integrated, and overlapping social structures …show more content…

By calculating data identifying inequalities alongside the Ministry of Health in random regions throughout Brazil, in 2012, Barufi, Haddad, and Paez, found numerous problems: Previous health care expansion was ineffective due to its inaccessibility, few socioeconomic improvements have restricted many impoverished people in Brazil to obtain any social mobility, and lastly without the proper infrastructure, there is little that can be done to reduce the infant mortality rate (p. 6-8). In relation, Narayan Sastry found through her studies of studying urban and rural child infant mortality in 1997 that, those community characteristics have a strong impact but do not directly have an effect Infant mortality in Brazil (p. 999-1001). In simpler terms, there are SDH that are not examined that have greater impacts but are not implemented due to its lack of studying. Though her numbers did not openly infer this, if a community has such an important impact, imagine what preventative care specified to each community could do to influence the IMR for those regions. As presented, infant mortality is clearly a problem but is often hard to precisely identity the greatest contributing factor. In the next section, the causes and effects of infant mortality will be

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