Ontario and Sudbury Social Determinants of Health Priorities

Public Health Ontario has developed an interactive site with the following qualifiers which are tracked and may be understood as to the importance by Ontario Government what Social Determinants of Health are priorities:

● Material Deprivation

● Ethnic Concentration

● Dependency

● Residential Instability

● Low Income

● Government Transfers

● Employment

● Receiving EI

From this list, income and social status, employment, education, culture, race/racism and healthy behaviours are inferred to being important. With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges it has presented, we hear a lot about food insecurity, especially in the northern part of the province with the difficulty in getting healthy food to the indigenous peoples in remote communities. Despite government programs/financial “safety nets”, economic barriers associated with wave one and wave two closures continue to contribute to ongoing job losses, further exacerbating inequities within Ontario.

The Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO) - The Commission on the Social Determinants of Health suggests three “principles of action”:

● Improve the conditions of daily life – the circumstances in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.

● Tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money, and resources – the structural drivers of those conditions of daily life – globally, nationally, and locally.

● Measure the problem, evaluate action, expand knowledge base, develop a workforce that is trained in the social determinants of health, and raise public awareness about the social determinants of health.

From this list, one infers the RNAO priorities are income and social status, childhood experiences, employment, and government support are among the important priorities.

The Big Nickel, Sudbury monument, built in 1964

The former Sudbury & District Health Unit (2011) reported poverty, social inequity, access to health care, education and food insecurity as opportunities to work in my public health unit area.

References

https://www.publichealthontario.ca/en/data-and-analysis/health-equity/social-determinants-of-health, accessed February 15, 2021.

https://rnao.ca/policy/projects/social-determinants-health, accessed February 15, 2021.

Sudbury & District Health Unit, 2011. Let’s Start a Conversation about Health… And not Talk about Health Care at all.