There's a lot of work on "social determinants of health" that involves helping individual patients get the things they need: secure housing, food security, transportation.
But the real message of the literature on social determinants is that factors larger than the individual - factors on a society level - affect individuals' health. And a corollary is that addressing these large-scale factors is likely to improve health for individuals.
A blog post by Health Affairs points out this distinction nicely.
Things that truly affect social-level function: building a grocery store in a "food desert," improving the safety a neighborhood, providing a low-cost gym, creating affordable housing, and creating a new employer that offers good jobs.
Unfortunately, truly addressing social determinants requires large-scale intervention. The market by itself cannot be counted on solve the problem because, after all, poor people don't have money. That leaves government, and in today's political climate, government action on almost anything is problematic.
Eventually, we will collectively discover that having disadvantaged environments in our midst is bad for everyone, and that individual responsibility cannot solve all problems in an interconnected world.
Comments