Читать книгу Contemporary Health Studies - Louise Warwick-Booth - Страница 64

Consider stage 2 hypertension as a threat to health. Outline as many influences as you can think of in relation to what determines the development of hypertension among individuals. Use the internet to help you explore the causes of hypertension. Represent these influences in a diagram, for example a ‘spider web of causation’, following Bhopal (2008), showing the connections between different influences.

Finally, think about how you conceptualize these influences. Do you see the influences that you listed as threats?

The dominant contemporary discourse for health is one of threats and disease. Giddens (1999) argues that the societal focus upon health risks leaves both governments and individuals debating the outcomes of such risks because there are no definitive answers. This is not entirely surprising, as generating positive health appears for many to be a less important priority than preventing and reducing mortality and morbidity. Indeed most ‘health’ targets underpinning practice are framed around reducing illness. For example, PHE (2019) aim to reduce poor health as a mechanism to save health and social care costs. However, a good example of an integrative framework of action in relation to desired health outcomes are the Sustainable Development Goals (see chapter 12 for a description of these), which consider the wider determinants of health.

This book demonstrates throughout part III in particular that there are a large range of determinants of health. Consequently, the threats to health discussed here are conceptualized as broad in scope to encapsulate the broad nature of determinants of health outlined in Dahlgren and Whitehead’s 1991 rainbow model. In this way seemingly non-related health factors such as climate change, war and conflict and poverty can be considered to be threats to health. This has important implications for who is defined as a health workforce and the types of initiatives and programmes that are considered to impact upon the health of populations.