Review the following lecture:
- Determinants of Health and Health Policy Making (listed below)
Healthcare Barriers
One of the primary reasons for underutilization of healthcare services is cost. However, Kullgren, McLaughlin, Mitra, and Armstrong (2012) comment that over 20 percent of Americans do not seek out healthcare service in a timely fashion due to nonfinancial reasons. These barriers have to do less with affordability and more with accessibility and acceptability.
Nonfinancial barriers to healthcare include lack of transportation, long wait times, and work or family responsibilities. Consider, also, issues such as health needs, language, and cultural norms. Review the article in depth and discuss some healthcare policies that could be adopted to overcome these nonfinancial barriers to accessing healthcare.
From the Internet, review the following:
- Kullgren, J. T., McLaughlin, C. G., Mitra, N., & Armstrong, K. (2012). Nonfinancial barriers and access to care for US adults. Health Services Research, 47(1pt2), 462485. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3393009/
To support your work, use your course and textbook readings and also use the . As in all assignments, cite your sources in your work and provide references for the citations in APA format.
Your posting should be a minimum of 200 words in length.
Determinants of Health
Current definitions of health emphasize that health is more than the absence of disease. Health is a state of wellness that hinges on proper function in a variety of dimensions. For example, good health is achieved only when there is a balance between health determinants: personal, social, economic, and environmental. These various factors that impact wellness must be addressed at multiple levelsindividual, community, national, internationalto ensure population level health. Blum pioneered a force field paradigm that posits that population health is directly impacted by four forces: environment, lifestyle, hereditary, and medical care. Dahlgren and Whitehead grouped the determinants of health into fixed factors, such as age and gender; and modifiable factors, such as behavior and access to products.
The most important movement to date is Healthy People 2020. This initiative aims to address questions about what makes some individuals healthy in comparison to others as well as how we can create a healthy society where there is an equal opportunity to be healthy. It is a national agenda to promote health groups, the determinants of health, into the following categories: biology and genetics, individual behavior, health services, social factors, and policy making. The interplay between these different factors is what determines our health at the individual and population levels. Throughout this course, we will focus on policy making at the local, state, and federal levels as well as the impact of policies on individual and population level health.
