Definition of Public Health | Graduate School of Public Health

Running head: PUBLIC HEALTH
Public health
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

1PUBLIC HEALTH
Indigenous people are known to suffer from disproportionate burden of health
problems compared to the non indigenous counterpart. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islanders is one of the indigenous groups that are globally experiencing health disparities (Lai
et al., 2018). The data by Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2020) reflects how this
group lag behinds in health outcomes compared to the non indigenous Australian group. This
report mentions that one in every three indigenous youths experienced high level of
psychological distress compared to one in eight for non indigenous groups. Moreover, 64%
of the burden of the disease for the group is from chronic disease and 19% of the burden was
caused by mental health and substance use disorder (AIHW, 2020). Considering the wide
attention that has been paid to reducing health disparity gaps for the group, identifying the
cause behind such disparity is important. Although discussing overall cause of disparity is not
within the scope of the paper. This paper will particularly explore how one social factor has
significantly played a role in influencing health disparity for the group.
The social determinants theory is based on the assumption that population health and
inequality is dependent on interconnected social factors. Social factors comprise those
societal factors that have impact throughout one’s life of an individual. This includes
housing, employment, educational level, access to health care and family support (Gurewich,
Garg & Kressin, 2020). This paper particularly focus on the social factor of access to health
as lack of access to quality health services has been found to be one of the contributing factor
behind poor health outcome and poor utilization of health services for the group. Davy et al.
(2016) report that the rate of cardiovascular disease in the country is 1.5 times more for
indigenous group compared to rest of the Australians. Despite such high rate, access to health
service is low because of high cost of health services, lack of access to services in the
indigenous community, remoteness of location, language gap between health care and
indigenous group and experiences of racism (). These are some social factors that explain