Notes of Professor SSCI 318 Review Flashcards
What is the importance of measuring health status?
Allows one to gather data and evidence within a country to compared
What are the determinants of health?
range of personal, social, economic and environmental factors which determine the health status of individuals or populations.
What are the key health indicators/measures?
Main indicators:
life expectancy at birth: the average number of additional years a newborn baby can be expected to live if current mortality trends were to continue for the rest of that person’s life.
infant mortality rate: “the number of deaths of infants under age 1 per 1,000 live births in a given year.
Maternal Mortality ratio: a measure of the risk of death that is associated with childbirth, the number of women who die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth complications per 100,000 live births in a given year.
Neonatal mortality rate: the number of deaths to infants younger than 28 days of age in a given year, per 1,000 live births in that year.
Under 5 mortality rate: the probability that a newborn will die before reaching age five, expressed as a number per 1,000 live births.
What is prevalence?
This refers to the number of people suffering from a certain health condition over a specific time period. It measures the chances of having a disease. For global health work, one usually refers to point prevalence of a condition, which is “the proportion of the population that is diseased at a single point in time.”16(p31) Let’s say, for example, that the point prevalence of HIV/AIDS among adults in South Africa was estimated to be 18.9 on the last day of 2016. This means that 18.9 percent of all adults between the ages of 15 and 49 in South Africa were estimated that day to be HIV-positive
Over a calendar year, 50 of the 350 initially disease-free inhabitants of a village in Sierra Leone contracted Ebola. What was the incidence over the year? What were a villager’s chances of contracting the disease over the year?
50/350 = .143 = a 14.3 percent chance
What is the incidence rate?
This measures how many people get a disease, for a specified number of people at risk, for a given period of time
How do diseases get classified?
When you read about health, there will be discussions of communicable diseases, noncommunicable diseases, and injuries. Communicable diseases are also called infectious diseases. These are illnesses that are caused by a particular infectious agent and that spread directly or indirectly from people to people, animals to people, or people to animals.22 Examples of communicable diseases include influenza, measles, and HIV. Noncommunicable diseases are illnesses that are not spread by any infectious agent, such as hypertension, coronary heart disease, and diabetes, even though they might have an infectious cause, such as cervical cancer. Injuries include, among other things, road traffic injuries, falls, drownings, poisonings, and violence
What is the vital registration?
The quality of data on population and health depends in many ways on the extent to which countries maintain a system of vital registration that can accurately record births, deaths, and the causes of death.
What is the BU school of public health? along with Rockefeller foundation.
Boston University,
What is happening in Kenya with data gaps?
In Nairobi, Kenya, investments in local data collection
and analysis have begun to fill critical gaps in recent
years. Data can now offer insights into the
health and well-being of populations and individuals in
different social positions
How can better data help us understand the SDoH better and thus inform health
decision-making and improve health, well-being, and health equity?
This would allow for a more complete understanding of SDoH SDoH (Social determinants of health) in a given context, the needs of vulnerable populations and existing inequities. A more complete understanding of SDoH, in turn, offers major opportunities for informing policy and practice, and to increase accountability. A human rights-based approach to data will ensure the use of data is consistent with international human rights norms and principles, including for participation, self-identification, transparency, privacy, and accountability. Third, data use is challenged by the complexity and interconnectedness of SDoH, calling for integrated and intersectoral approaches to tackle health outcomes. Data collection and disaggregation must go beyond gender, geography, and age, ensuring that all health determinants are identified and addressed, to leave no one behind
What did WHO signed in 1946?
When the World Health Organization (WHO) Constitution was signed in 1946, the WHO
stressed that health is a fundamental human right for all
What did the Universal declaration of human rights do? Signed in 1948
Rights pointed to the need for an appropriate standard of living for all to secure the right to health. The
Declaration clearly spelled out that in addition to medical care, the sick required food, clothing, housing,
employment, and necessary social services
What do the following acronyms mean: WHO CSDH, WHO HSS?
WHO Commission on the Social
Determinants of Health, (an effort to provide evidence and confirm the
previous landmarks and concepts linked to health, human rights, and human development)
WHO health systems strengthening (tools for data quality assurance, synthesis, and
analysis, with a focus on building country level capacity)
How will countries tackle a problem?
Prioritization of determinants may vary based on availability and use of data
First, depending on income level, countries may
tackle a specific health determinant, such as housing,
in various ways. Housing is an intermediate determinant
of health that influences and is influenced by root
causes, such as social, macroeconomic,
Second, different determinants may take different
priorities to address a given health need in a country.
For example, approaches to tuberculosis (TB) may be
prioritized across global, national, and local levels
Third, the prioritization of certain determinants may
vary based on the availability and use of data. For
instance, Rashid and colleagues [36] highlighted the
importance of capturing the experiences of people living
and working in slums in Bangladesh during the
COVID-19 pandemic and translating those to contextspecific strategies for lockdown
