Transcription
[Music] Public health has two main goals. The first goal is to promote the health of the population, and the second goal is to reduce health inequities. And those are really moral aims or ethical endeavors that public health is concerned with.
I'm just going to focus for a minute on the second one, which is around health equity and promoting health equity as a primary public health goal. Health equity is really about ensuring that everyone in the population has the resources for health. And so, when we're addressing health equity, we need to be concerned about unfair or unjust conditions that create a situation in which some members of the population are disadvantaged in terms of gaining access to their full optimal level of health.
So, when we think about health equity as a moral endeavor, that means that there's a set of ethical issues that we have to be concerned about. And it's not kind of your usual set of ethical issues that we might think about. Such as, in public health ethics, we do think about things like emergency preparedness; we think about uh, dealing with health communications and when we should communicate to the public what's the right information at the right time.
When we're talking about health equity issues, we're actually concerned with issues that are very much of concern across society because they disadvantage individuals from gaining access to resources to help. So, as examples, we can think about the fact that sometimes people are not able to achieve health because of issues related to stigma, to racism, to gender bias, to sexual discrimination. Those are examples of equity issues because not everyone has the same opportunity for health because those kinds of social conditions create disadvantage, um, and people can't always access the same kind of resources.
Another example would be if you think of living in a poor neighborhood; you don't have the same access to nutritional food to safe and adequate housing. Those are other—we often call those the determinants of health—and those determinants really influence whether people are able to be healthy or not. So we kind of have a whole additional set of ethical issues that arise when we take very seriously this aim to promote health and to reduce health [Music] inequities [Music] you