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Are We Producing the Right Kind of Actionable Evidence for the Social Determinants of Health?

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Abstract

Globally, health and social inequities are growing and are created, actively maintained, and aggravated by existing policies and practices. The call for evidence-based policy making to address this injustice seems a promising strategy to facilitate a reversal of existing strategies and the design of new effective programming. Acting on evidence to address inequities requires congruence between identifying the major drivers of disparities and the study of their causes and solutions. Yet, current research on inequities tends to focus on documenting disparities among individuals or subpopulations with little focus on identifying the macro-social causes of adverse population health. Moreover, the research base falls far short of a focus on the solutions to the complex multilevel drivers of disparities. This paper focuses upon recommendations to refocus and improve the public health research evidence generated to inform and create strong evidence-based recommendations for improving population health.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been funded in part by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research under grant #101693, entitled “Power, Politics, and the Use of Health Equity Research.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Research on Inner City Health, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Patricia O’Campo

  2. Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Patricia O’Campo

  3. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Patricia O’Campo

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Correspondence to Patricia O’Campo.

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O’Campo, P. Are We Producing the Right Kind of Actionable Evidence for the Social Determinants of Health?. J Urban Health 89, 881–893 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-012-9695-5

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