Health, both individually and collectively, is socially produced. Social determinants of health considers why health differences matter on ethical and practical grounds, and how can we act to effectively intervene on these differences.
A variety of personal, social and economic factors influence health status. SPHA 556 Social Determinants of Health (MHA Year Two) provides an introduction to some of the foundational thinking that has given rise to the concept of population health. Students will be able to identify the key social determinants of health and a selection of frameworks that link these to the population’s health and to articulate case examples of policy initiatives and programs either proposed or currently in place to address issues in population health.
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Instructor Profile
Dr. Chris McLeod
Dr. Chris McLeod
Assistant Professor
CIHR New Investigator
Dr. Chris McLeod is the co-research lead of the Partnership for Work, Health and Safety at SPPH. His research focuses on the program and policy evaluation of occupational health policies and practices and on the causes and consequences of work-related injury and disease. Dr. McLeod is also a content data expert for Population Data BC and is actively working on developing and extending the occupational health data available to researchers through Population Data BC. Current areas of research include an assessment of the effectiveness of occupational health and safety management systems on work injury; an examination of the etiology and outcomes of serious work-related injury; and national and international comparative work with jurisdictions in Ontario, Manitoba, Australia, and New Zealand.
More broadly, Chris’s research explores how institutional and economic structures across countries affect health and health inequalities over the working life course. This research uses high quality comparable longitudinal data from representative economies to examine the relationship between employment and working conditions and worker health within and across countries. His work examining the relationship between unemployment and health, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, has been recently published in the Annual Review of Public Health and the American Journal of Public Health. In 2013 Chris received a CIHR New Investigator Award to expand this program of research. He is also an Early Career Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.