Social determinants of health and health-related social needs are frequently featured in both popular news sources and academic publications. These excerpts from six recent stories caught our eye.
Social determinants of health comes up from time to time in health policy news, reports, and scholarly articles. Here are quotes from five of these that caught my eye recently.
In one of his recent Health Care Triage videos, Aaron Carroll calls attention to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association that supposedly tells us something new about plant-based diets and health.
This is a guest post by Lynn Todman, PhD, the executive director for population health at Spectrum Health Lakeland in St. Joseph, Michigan, where she also serves on the City Commission. She is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leadership Fellow.
In the 1980s through the mid-1990s there was little the health system could do to address AIDS. Today there is a lot. Would we therefore attribute no deaths to AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s to access to health care and some of them to that factor today?
Here’s a puzzle: To what would you attribute deaths from AIDS today? Genetics? Behavior? Social or environmental factors? The health system (or its failure)? Something else? Once you have your answer, how would you know it was right? How would you test it? What evidence would you need? What studies would you do?
How much value do we obtain per dollar spent on the health system? How has that changed over time? How does it compare across countries? These are tough but important questions.
The risks to health faced by Americans long ago are different from those we face today. Some of the things that once killed many people (like poor sanitation) now kill many fewer. On the other hand, we now face new risks (like death from auto accidents) that didn’t exist a century ago.
The U.S. is the biggest spender on health care in the world, yet national health outcomes do not reflect this massive investment. This fact forces us to question the value of health care spending: are our health care dollars worth it?
What drives health? This is the big and challenging question my team and I are facing on a new, one – year project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This website is devoted to this question, and we invite you to engage with us as we explore it.
