hard definitions

• Life expectancy: an indication on how long a person can expect to live; it's the number of years of life remaining to a person at a particular age if death rates do not change.
• Health status: an individual or population's overall health, taking into account various aspects such as LE, amount of disability and levels of disease risk factors.
• Illness: a subjective concept related to personal experience of a disease or injury
• Disease: a physical or mental disturbance involving symptoms, dysfunction or tissue damage
• Infirmity: the quality of state of being weak or ill; often associated with old age
• Health Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE): a measure of burden of disease based on life expectancy at birth, but including an adjustment for time spent in poor health

  
  

  It's the number of years in full health a person can expect to live, based on current rates of ill health and mortality
• Spiritual HWB: relates to the ideas, beliefs, values and ethics that arise in the minds and conscience of human beings

  Includes concepts such as hope, peace, a guiding sense of meaning or value and reflection on your place in the world
• Social HWB: relates to the ability to form meaningful and satisfying relationships with others and the ability to manage or adapt appropriately to diff social situations
• Mental HWB: the current state of wellbeing relating to a person's mind or brain and the ability to process information
• HWB: the state of a person's physical, social, emotional, mental and spiritual existence characterised by an equilibrium in which the individual feels happy, healthy, capable and engaged
• WHO definition (1946): the state of a person's physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity

  Limitations:

  • complete wellbeing in all dimensions is difficult to achieve and beyond the capacity of people
  • doesn't give everyone the opportunity to be considered healthy

  Advantages:

  • first time health was considered as being more than physical health
  • Acknowledges absence of disease as only one aspect of health
• Why infant mortality rates often reflect overall HWB experienced in a country:

  • Can be analysed to determine the effectiveness of a country's maternal resources and services
  • Reflects country's ability to provide all necessary resources (such as healthcare, shelter and food) for infants, as infants rely on others to meet their needs, since they are particularly vulnerable to premature mortality due to underdeveloped immune and other body systems

  Reduced infant mortality rates = indicates improvements in one or more areas of society such as medical technology, education and income
• It's important to look at both incidence and prevalence rates:

  As conditions can be long-lasting, and prevelance rates look at the total number of cases at a certain time rather than just new diagnoses
• Why did WHO include prerequisites for health in the Ottawa Charter?

  • nine prerequisites represent basic conditions and resources that must be available to people if gains in HWB are to occur
  • helps governments and other groups to focus their work around providing all people with basic necessities for a decent life
• Peace: relates to the absence of conflict
• Shelter describes a structure that provides protection from the outside environment
• Education: ensuring that all children complete a full course of primary and secondary schooling and that everyone can develop the skills they need to gain meaningful employment
• Income: being able to access adequate financial resources to have a decent standard of living
• Social justice refers to equal rights for all, regardless of personal traits such as sex, class and income, ethnicity, religion, age or sexual orientation
• Sustainable resources relates to ensuring that all resources used to promote HWB in the present are available for future generations, so they too can experience a good quality of life
• Stable ecosystem occurs when balance is achieved between the environment and the species that live in an environment
• Equity is a concept that relates to fairness and social justice, but has a particular focus on disadvantaged groups