In this guest post, Lauri Andress continues her series on community participation and public health. In order to bring more clarity to the concept of community participation, Lauri provides a framework that
attempts to discern a range of benefits that stem from community participation. She argues that some justifications for community participation are more likely to benefit the community than others. Also outlined are various mechanisms through which these benefits impact population health.

In this post, guest blogger Maria Pawlowska discusses anti-abortion policies in Malta, drawing comparisons to her previous post on Poland and relating the harmful repercussions of these policies to the influence of the Catholic Church, social conservatism, and gender inequality.

In this guest post, Ted Schrecker offers a commentary on how the 2011 World Conference on Social Determinants of Health might restore an otherwise ailing SDOH agenda. Ted is an associate Professor in the University of Ottawa’s Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine, and a principal scientist at the University’s Institute of Population Health.

This guest post is the first in a series of posts which will critique the use of community participatory methods in public health. The author of this series, Lauri Andress, is a public health policy analyst at Andress & Associates where she advises US public health departments on policies, programs, and competencies related to health inequities. In this introductory piece, Lauri introduces the idea of community involvement and demonstrates its alignment with a social determinants of health perspective.

In this guest post, Kate Jongbloed presents housing instability as social determinant of HIV/AIDS in Canada. Kate draws on others’ arguments that the absence of a national housing policy is to blame for fueling housing instability, with severe implications for the HIV epidemic.

Guest Blogger, Sebastián Peña  Fajuri, is a Chilean medical doctor and an associate editor at the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Finland where he is currently working on a ‘Health in All Policies’ book for the Global Conference on Health Promotion in Helsinki 2013. In a series of posts, Sebastián will explore the [...]