Question

What are social determinants of health? How do social determinants of health contribute to the development of illness? What is a communicable disease chain? Are there steps that a nurse can take to break a link within the communicable disease chain? Give a specific example.

Readings within your text covering international/global health and the following websites will assist you in answering these questions:

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Global Health website: http://www.cdc.gov/cogh/index.htm

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Global Health website: http://www.globalhealth.gov/index.html

Families USA - Why Global Health Matters—Here and Abroad website: http://www.familiesusa.org/

World Health Organization (WHO) website: http://www.who.int

Answer 1

Healthcare standards are rising now a days due to involvement of government bodies and clear vision of healthcare service providers as people's now a days are more conscious about the health due to drastic change in life cycle and environments.

World health organization has identified some factors which are playing key role in the health of society. Which can be identified as key determinants.

According to WHO determinants means cumulative behavioural, biological, socioeconomical and environmental factors which are contributing to the health and influence the status of society.

These determinants can be classified as

1. Social determinants.

2. Environmental determinants.

3. Cultural determinants.

• Social determinants : These are the key determinants focusing on to social causes influencing the health such as

1. Social status- social status of person contributes towards health more than anything else as person having higher status would choose to occupy with best quality health measure as much as they can afford to be for betterment of life.
2. Economic stability: economical stability also plays role in health care service where person can accommodate himself with affordable and better health care service.
3. Education and community context : As education makes individuals independent for various life goals this will also play major role in terms of health and lifestyle of person as higher the education individual perssives it is observed that the standard of living of person goes high and so that the healthcare needs.
4. Personal factors and individual behavior: personal factors such as age, sex, religion and lifestyle the individual lives contributes majorly in the healthcare context this is ultimately direct the personal for particular health condition in future where he needs to take note of as life proceeds. Again individual behaviour of person will also influence the health of person such as if person is with pleasing personality ever and never give way to stress then healthy life of such person would be more than the person who is having bad behaviour and life styles such as alcoholics or stressed personality.

• Communicable disease chain :

Communicable disease chain is the mechanism by means of which the infection or illness causing agent get spread in the society from one host to another that is from one person to another.

There are generally 2 major pathways of transmission chain takes place

A. Direct transmission

B. Indirect transmission

Above was the flow diagram representing the steps of transmission chain for communicable diseases.

Where infectious vector maybe identified as some bacterias, viruses, fungus, protozoan or helminths and transmissions may takes place from host to host that is from human to human or to animal or to insect by means of air, water, ingestion or physical contact.

Looking towards above steps of transmission we as nursing staff can break these chain to prevent the communicable disease to spread by means of maintaining sanitation around the society and managing waste water and waste treatment plans with minimum exposure to the healthy environment.

Which will lead to break process resulting in healthy environment in society. Also we can educate people around to take proper care and neccesory action to avoid infection from such disease. As healthcare practice we can isolate the infected people and treat them separately away from healthy people and impliment preventive medication if required such as vaccination programme to boost the immunity of susceptible community.