The Future of Social Determinants of Health: Looking Upstream to Structural Drivers

• Published in: The Milbank quarterly Vol. 101; no. S1; pp. 36 - 60
• Main Authors: BROWN, TYSON H., HOMAN, PATRICIA
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.04.2023; John Wiley and Sons Inc
• Subjects: Data; Fairness; Health disparities; Health Equity; Health Status Disparities; Humans; Infrastructure; Intersectionality; LGBT+ stigma; Macro and Structural Drivers of Population Health; Oppression; Population Health; racism; sexism; Social Determinants of Health; Social factors; structural oppression; racism; social determinants of health; population health; health equity; sexism; structural oppression; LGBT+ stigma
• ISSN: 0887-378X; 1468-0009; 1468-0009
• DOI: 10.1111/1468-0009.12641

Policy Points Policies that redress oppressive social, economic, and political conditions are essential for improving population health and achieving health equity. Efforts to remedy structural oppression and its deleterious effects should account for its multilevel, multifaceted, interconnected, systemic, and intersectional nature. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services should facilitate the creation and maintenance of a national publicly available, user‐friendly data infrastructure on contextual measures of structural oppression. Publicly funded research on social determinants of health should be mandated to (a) analyze health inequities in relation to relevant data on structural conditions and (b) deposit the data in the publicly available data repository.