Winter Webinar - Living the Social Determinants of Health

Join this Winter Webinar with featured speaker for the Centre for Society, Health and Care Research Professor Kate Senior.

The social determinants of health are defined as “the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live and age and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. These forces include economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, polices and political systems” (WHO 2017).

The World Health Definition is widely used and marks an important acknowledgement that health is influenced by far more factors than disease and access to health services. Such definitions, however, tend to reduce the social determinants into a set of discrete variables which can be measured and evaluated.

In the process the important bit, which is the ‘social’ in the social determinants of health, with all the attendant messiness and complexity of human experience can be lost. This talk explores the lived experience of the social determinants of health, based on long term ethnographic engagement, to show how health is impacted by complex, interacting social, cultural and economic factors, as well as power, politics and inequality.

This presentation is based on my work in remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. These are communities have some of the worst health outcomes in the country and are defined by lower life expectancies and high levels of preventable disease. In such places, attending just to health, through the provision of services, has not improved peoples experiences. Exploring the lived experience of the social determinants of health provides an understanding of why these inequalities persist.

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