PUBH630: Reflective Essay on Determinants of Health & Public Health

This essay provides a reflection on the determinants of health, emphasizing their significant influence on the health status of individuals and communities. It explores the complex interactions between social, economic, behavioral, and environmental factors in shaping health outcomes. The essay considers the unit content relative to existing knowledge and skills, highlighting the importance of addressing health equity, ecological factors, behavioral determinants, and the impact of education and income levels. It also discusses the application of this knowledge to future public health practice and its relationship to competency standards, particularly those set by CAPHIA. The reflection underscores the need for public health practitioners to understand the context of people's lives, formulate effective health policies, and learn from past interventions to improve health outcomes and promote health equity.

Running head: REFLECTION ON DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH 1
Reflection on the Determinants of Health
Student’s name
Institutional Affiliation

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Reflection on the Determinants of Health
Determinants of health are a range of factors that have a significant influence on the
health status of different people. Every single stage of life, health is determined by sophisticated
interactions between the social and economic aspects, personal behavior, and the physical
environment. They all exist as one and do not isolate themselves from one another. Health
determinants are essential parameters in the field of nursing and public health. This paper aims at
reflecting on these determinants of health by consideration of unit content relative to existing
knowledge and skills, and application to future practice and relationship to competency standards
in demonstrating advanced understanding of the different types of health determinants and their
importance to the practice of public health.
Consideration of unit content relative to existing knowledge and skills
It is exciting to note that many factors combine to cause an effect on individuals and
communities. Regardless of whether people are healthy or not, health is very much determined
by their environment and circumstances. To a substantial extent factors like where we live, the
environmental status the genetic makeup, our relationships with family and friends, education
level and income levels all play a crucial role in determining our health (Marmot, 2018).
However, some of the most commonly regarded factors like access and the use of services in
health care usually have a less impact on health. It is thus imperative for the public health
practitioners and the nurses to have in mind that the health of individuals also is much
determined by certain factors which when they don't operate normally, they will harm the
individuals (Baum,2016). It is also essential that the public health practitioners or in the practice
of public health to understand that the context of people’s lives determine their health and thus it
is inappropriate for public health practitioners to lay blame to individuals for having deteriorated

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health or giving credit to people for having good health. People are usually not able to control
significantly many health determinants. It is through understanding the existing determinants of
health that we, as public health practitioners, can administer the right models and concepts of
improving health. Similarly, it is through understanding these determinants that we can enact
policies that best focus on addressing specific health determinates. They are, therefore,
significant in the practice of public health.
For instance, development of the patient care delivery model is a step towards knowing
working environments as nurses or health care providers are provided with evidence based
management tools. Examples of some of the topics in the unit content are: one, healthy equity,
which traditionally was not given special attention but today it is one of the considerations that
are prioritized in field of nursing. Second topic is ecology and health which in the past was less
associated with the health outcomes in individuals but today nursing has a holistic approach of
handling different health outcomes in belief that the issue might be the surrounding. Third, is the
behavioral determinant; in the past an individual’s or client’s health behavior was not given
much emphasis as today. the last topic is education and income levels; these are health
determinants that used to determine largely the wellness of n individual but as nursing profession
evolves, there are enhanced health promotional events that enlightens the clients or patients on
the right way to go thus they are not much in darkness like in the past.
On the other hand, environmental health is essential and useful in health interventions
and practice (Finn, Herne, & Castille, 2017). There is a significant impact that the society,
economy, politics, ethics, and ecology has on the environmental health intervention and practice.
Political goodwill is one of the factors that have been hindering the practice of health because of
failure to timely formulate appropriate environmental interventions and the practices. Similarly,

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to what has been observed in the society; there are sometimes when the community is resistant
and willing to change because of fear of the unknown and this to a large extent affect the
implementations of the interventions under formulation and hence practice (Garg, Boynton-
Jarrett & Dworkin, 2016).
Application to future practice and relationship to competency standards
Learning and studying about the determinants of health has a lot of say in our future ,
especially now that we will be the future public health experts and practitioners. It is undoubted
that whatever we learn today, we will need to implement and put into practices in the future. In
this case, tomorrow might also be the future. Therefore, the knowledge on the health
determinants that we have acquired and we continue learning is necessary for navigating and
formulation of outstanding health policies that will be ‘the sought for references’ (Taylor, Tan,
Coyle, Ndumele, Rogan, Canavan, & Bradley, 2016). Applying this knowledge in the future will
be very easy since as a health professional, I will have the background information on specific
indications of health. In other words, there will get to a point that I will be able to judge a
population to be at a very high probability of getting specific disease than the rest of the
community. I will also be able to tell what are the appropriate interventions to put in place
because of the existence of a sure indicator of health. CAPHIA competency standards demand
that a public health graduate should attain the practice in the six areas of public health practice'
("Foundation Competencies for Public Health Graduates and Curriculum Framework," 2018).
Disease protection and disease prevention are one of the practice and the determinants of health
fall in this category; therefore, it is relevant to meeting the CAPHIA competencies.
It is essential to understand the social, economic, ecological and political factors and the
impact they have in environmental health intervention and practice so that the future will not

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struggle with these factors that negatively affect the health intervention and practice (Rode,
Wittmer, Emerton & Schröter-Schlaack, 2016). Learning about the determinants of health that
falls in any of these categories helps and equips us as future public health practitioners to learn
from the ‘past mistakes and the past interventions that did not work so that we will not repeat the
same in future instead come up with more ‘advanced and relevant to the dispensation’ (Baum,
Machalaba, Daszak, Salerno, & Karesh, 2017); (Finn, Herne, & Castille, 2017). Thus, I believe
that we are being trained to becoming active, competent public health practitioners since unit
content falls under CAPHIA competencies.
References
Baum, F., (2016). The new public health (No. Ed. 4). Oxford University Press.
Baum, S. E., Machalaba, C., Daszak, P., Salerno, R. H., & Karesh, W. B. (2017). Evaluating one
health: are we demonstrating effectiveness? One Health, 3, 5-10.
Finn, S., Herne, M., & Castille, D. (2017). The value of traditional ecological knowledge for the
environmental health sciences and biomedical research. Environmental health
perspectives, 125(8), 085006.

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Foundation Competencies for Public Health Graduates and Curriculum Framework. (2018, May
15). Retrieved from http://caphia.com.au/foundation-competencies-for-public-health-
graduates/
Garg, A., Boynton-Jarrett, R., & Dworkin, P. H., (2016). Avoiding the unintended consequences
of screening for social determinants of health. Jama, 316(8), 813-814.
Marmot, M., (2018). Social Determinants, Capabilities, and Health Inequalities: A Response to
Bhugra, Greco, Fennell, and Venkatapuram.
Rode, J., Wittmer, H., Emerton, L., & Schröter-Schlaack, C. (2016). ‘Ecosystem service
opportunities’: A practice-oriented framework for identifying economic instruments to
enhance biodiversity and human livelihoods. Journal for nature conservation, 33, 35-
47.
Taylor, L. A., Tan, A. X., Coyle, C. E., Ndumele, C., Rogan, E., Canavan, M., ... & Bradley, E.
H. (2016). Leveraging the social determinants of health: what works? PLoS One, 11(8),
e0160217.

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