Social Determinants Of Ill Health In Australia

A culture of ill health: is it public health or Aboriginality?

Indigenous people of Australia have more disability and die at a younger age compared to non-indigenous Australians. Almost 70% of the Australian indigenous population died before the age of sixty-five in the years of 1999-2003. The indigenous population has two and half times the burden of disease that the non-indigenous population of Australia has (Donato & Segal, 2013). This Ill health contributes to reduced quality of life for indigenous populations. Health for Aboriginal people is not just an individual’s physical well-being but, the well-being of the whole community in aspects of physical, emotional, social and cultural well-being. Other aspects incorporated into defining …show more content…
Circumstances that people are born into, live and grow up in and how much control they have over situations are also important determinants of health disparity, just as differences in lifestyles (e.g.- alcohol misuse and smoking) and access to healthcare (Marmot, 2011). Other causative factors of poor indigenous health are psychosocial (e.g.-dispossession, life stresses and racism), poor education (e.g.- low literacy rates, school nonattendance, lack of resources), Economical burdens and substandard physical environment (e.g. – overcrowded housing and lack of transport) (Carson, Dunbar, Chenhall, & Bailie, …show more content…
The goal of public health is the biologic, physical, and mental well-being of all members of society. Thus, unlike medicine, which focuses on the health of the individual patient, public health focuses on the health of the public in the aggregate” (Detels, 2009). Even though public health programmes are used achieve considerable reduction in morbidity and mortality in population groups, they fail to address condition and social context people live in and generally statistics obtained nationwide tend to mask disparities between and within population groups in terms of unequal access to services, population group’s vulnerabilities and various risks they are exposed to (Blas, Sommerfeld, & Kurup, 2011). Australia is currently in the process of implementing an indigenous health policy, which aims to close the gap in health disparity between the indigenous and the non-indigenous populations of Australia.
The Council of Australian Governments signed an agreement, The National Indigenous health reform (Closing the Gap strategy) in 2008, committing the government to enhance Indigenous health and wellbeing. Time frames and specific targets that were incorporated in to this agreement include: reducing infant mortality rate gaps by half, eradicating the life expectancy gap in a generation and Reducing the gap in literacy within a decade. Social

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