Growing commentary has covered much ground on the causes, faults, and promise of the Occupy Wall St. movement. However, a stone that has yet to be overturned is the one that should have public health professionals, as well as anyone who cares about the health of their community, taking to the streets.

In this guest post, Kate Thomson discusses the elimination of a national taskforce proven to reduce health inequalities in England. She asks whether the shift of responsibility to local authorities will render health equity concerns into unaffordable luxuries. Kate is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Public Health at Birmingham City University and is currently researching health reforms in the Russian Federation.

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.

In May 2009, the World Health Assembly called on national governments to politically commit to tackle health inequities and to embrace the principles outlined in the final report of World Health Organization’s (WHO) Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDOH). In my last post, Healthy Policies looked at a recent Lancet debate over who owns [...]

In a quiet debate published by The Lancet, American public health researchers dispute “who owns health inequalities” , and what health-care reform legislation will do to reduce them. But are these researchers missing the proverbial forest for the trees? The conversation begins with a piece by Constance Nathanson (2010) which asserts, among other things, that [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Obama was featured on the front page of the New York Times, laughing in an Iowa bookstore while holding up a copy of  Mitt Romney’s book, ‘No Apology’ and Karl Rove’s book, ‘Courage and Consequence’. On tour celebrating the passage of health care reform legislation, he joked that’d he’d wait [...]

These blogs consistently address health equity issues while directing attention to upstream, macro-level determinants of health: Equality Trust Economic Governance for Health The Equity Channel Croakey Health Impact Assessment Blog Know of any others?

Two major health inequality reports were recently released, one in the UK and the other in the US. This is the final post in a series which seeks to better understand the health perspective of these reports. Understanding variations in how health inequality research is pursued is important because health perspectives can undermine attention to the broader determinants of health inequalities and hinder the development of healthy public policies. While the true policy implications of the reports remain to be seen, the difference in health perspectives of the two reports is astounding.

Two major health inequality reports were recently released, one in the UK and the other in the US. This post is the third in a series which seeks to better understand the health perspective of these reports. In the first post we talked about the implications of how researchers frame their studies. In the second [...]

Establishing an evidence base on the social determinants of health is essential for the development of responsible public policy. In this post we will present six conceptual and theoretical challenges associated with generating, synthesizing and interpreting evidence on the social determinants of health.