NS40049X - Examining the Social Determinants and Factors of Health

This essay provides a comprehensive overview of the factors influencing health and illness, including social determinants and inequalities. It identifies both positive and negative factors, such as heredity, lifestyle, socio-economic conditions, and internal/external organizational factors. The essay also discusses the impact of stress, adversity, coping mechanisms, locus of control, resilience, and self-regulation on health status. It emphasizes the importance of addressing these factors to improve overall health outcomes and reduce health disparities. Desklib offers a wide range of resources, including past papers and solved assignments, to help students further explore these topics.

Understanding Health and
Illness NS40049X

Table of Contents
Social determinant and inequalities in health..................................................................................1
Identify factors that influence health both positively and negatively.....................................1
Internal and external factors that may affect health...............................................................1
Health status may be affected by factors: -............................................................................2
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................4

Social determinant and inequalities in health
Social determinates are the factor which effect the health, the conditions in which people live,
grow, learn and survive their daily life. It includes some social and economic status, environment
factors, education, unemployment and health care (Northwood and et. al., 2018). Inequalities in
health refers to unfair distribution of health and facilities of health among the people such as
Social class inequality, gender inequality, wealth inequality (Settipani and et. al., 2018).
Identify factors that influence health both positively and negatively
Health is effected by many positive and negative factors in which people survive their life.
Some positive factors that influence health such as: -
Heredity factor: - Some disease is genetic like diabetes and hypertension. So the health of an
individual depends on their genetic characters (Friedman, 2021).
Life style: - It includes behaviour of an individual and also some bad habits like smoking,
alcoholism by which number of diseases caused such as cancer, heart disease, mental retardation.
Good life style makes a betterment in health.
Social-economic factors: - It includes source of income, lack of education, unhealthy
nutrition and employment.
Source of income: - Wealthy people have a capacity to take a better treatment and they
are healthy but they are inactive due to this many diseases caused like obesity, heart attack and
hypertension (Crespo and et. al., 2019).
Education: - It plays an important role in health and helps people to know the importance of
good health and environment.
Balance diet: - Good nutrition is important for growth and also helps in prevent from
diseases.
Employment: - People well educated have a good health and lack of unemployment people do
not able to acquire a good health.
Internal and external factors that may affect health
Internal factors are the healthcare services provided and controlled by the organization they
include some factors are discussed further.
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Culture of organization: - organization’s culture may consist of employee satisfaction,
communication, growth, performance, process, system of work, leadership and role of
management (Ding and et. al., 2019).
Nursing staff: - Nurses provide resources to improve their diseases and give information
about the health. They detect the illness and provide mental support to their families.
Financial situation: - Financial management provides a better performance in hospital and
increases the high quality care of patient. Being poor condition of hospital may lead to high risk
of patient death, lack of insufficient treatment patient suffers from the problems.
External factors are the structure, ownership, regulations of organization, ownership of
facilities are observed as internal factor that effect internal healthcare delivery. The capacity of
an organization to control many patients and maintain the limit when providing high quality care
(Yusof and et. al., 2019).
There are some external factors that may affect the health are income security,
environment issue, lack of health care, social policies, health services, working conditions, safety
and social support, education, technology.
Health status may be affected by factors: -
Stress: - Stress may lead to emotional, depression, panic attack, anxiety and other worries
but sometimes it can be good by motivating and avoiding the risk factor of causing stress. It can
bring some symptoms and disease like headache, anxiety, headache, high blood pressure, chest
pain and insomnia. Excessive consumption of alcohol, drugs, smoking that causes problems and
increase stress level that is harmful for the health.
Adversity: - Adversity may leads to many positive and negative impact on health like
mental illness, risk of developing health issues, mental retardation, depression, unconscious
condition and depression, physical disability, emotionally weakness, poverty, thinking about the
past due to unpleasant experience in childhood.
Copying mechanism:-It can help people to reduce the stress, pain full emotions, avoid
difficulties and manage the external situation which causes problems. It improves mental and
emotional stress and to cope up with anxiety, stress and anger people may become social active
and communicate with others. (Lainamngern and Sawmong, 2019)
2

Locus of control: - It means a level of power to control the situation by changing their own
behaviour. People with strong locus of control come over with their problems and resulting of
their own action. It is a problem solving expectation and people get satisfied themselves.
Resilience: - Resilience protect from health conditions like anxiety, depression, it can also
equalize factor that increase the risk factor of mental health and the trauma. It provides self-
confidence, patience, self-awareness, helps to focus on positive thoughts and image.
Self-regulation: - It is a process in which people controls and manage their emotions,
negative thoughts, frustration, anger, excitement and self-motivating. It helps in adjusting
according to a situation.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Alarussi, A.S. and Alhaderi, S.M., 2018. Factors affecting profitability in Malaysia. Journal of
Economic Studies.
Crespo, N.F., Rodrigues, R., Samagaio, A. and Silva, G.M., 2019. The adoption of management
control systems by start-ups: Internal factors and context as determinants. Journal of
Business Research, 101, pp.875-884.
Ding, H., Fu, Y., Zheng, L. and Yan, Z., 2019. Determinants of the competitive advantage of
dairy supply chains: Evidence from the Chinese dairy industry. International Journal of
Production Economics, 209, pp.360-373.
Friedman, C., 2021. Social determinants of health, emergency department utilization, and people
with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Disability and Health Journal, 14(1),
p.100964.
Glover, R.E., van Schalkwyk, M.C., Akl, E.A., Kristjannson, E., Lotfi, T., Petkovic, J.,
Petticrew, M.P., Pottie, K., Tugwell, P. and Welch, V., 2020. A framework for
identifying and mitigating the equity harms of COVID-19 policy interventions. Journal
of clinical epidemiology, 128, pp.35-48.
Lainamngern, S. and Sawmong, S., 2019. Determinants of Thai Airways passenger trust: A
structural equation model analysis. Journal of Business and Retail Management
Research, 13(3).
Northwood, M., Ploeg, J., Markle‐Reid, M. and Sherifali, D., 2018. Integrative review of the
social determinants of health in older adults with multimorbidity. Journal of Advanced
Nursing, 74(1), pp.45-60.
Settipani, C.A., Hawke, L.D., Virdo, G., Yorke, E., Mehra, K. and Henderson, J., 2018. Social
determinants of health among youth seeking substance use and mental health
treatment. Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 27(4),
p.213.
Thi Thuy Nga, N., FitzGerald, G. and Dunne, M.P., 2018. Family-based social health insurance
for informal workers in Vietnam: Willingness to pay and its determinants. Asia Pacific
Journal of Public Health, 30(6), pp.512-520.
Yusof, Z.M., Ahmed, A.L., Misiran, M. and Mahmuddin, M., 2019. Stress determinants among
university students in Universiti Utara Malaysia. Asian People Journal (APJ), 2(2), pp.9-
17.
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