Section 3

• Closing the Gap in a Generation included improving the daily life conditions. Five main areas to this: equity from the start, healthy places and healthy people, fair employment and decent work, social protection across the lifecourse, universal healthcare
• Housing as an SDH has three main dimensions: Physical dimension (water, sanitation, electricity), social dimension (affordability, safety, lack of overcrowding), and spatial dimension (location in relation to other things)
• Indigenous people experience poor living conditions, mainly due to long-term drinking water advisories (not safe to drink for more than a year)
• The Jamaican study looked at the relationship between ensuring development of children, both physical and psychosocial, and a child's long term development in life
• Adverse working conditions are associated with poor physical health and psychosocial health, increasing coronary heart disease. Job security is an important SDH as it provides financial security, and increased opportunities
• The pandemic had a mental impact on many people, regardless of job security due to having to work in different conditions, such as a home environment
• Meera Mahadevan addressed the issue of migrant workers not being able to afford to pay for childcare for their children. To address this, he founded Modile Creches Program, which runs daycare centres around construction sites in India, providing a safe and enriching environment of children of migrant workers
• The second goal of Closing the Gap involves improving living conditions, which includes improving the larger built-in environment where people live
• City life can lead to sedentary lifestyles, pollution, and crowded living conditions, negatively impacting population health.
• Urbanization can lead to crowding, where volume of stores and services does not keep up with the increased population demand. Such resources include grocery stores, healthcare service, etc. People suffer from underinvestment by the government. Cost of housing increases...
• Urbanization leads to violence and injuries, such as crime rates. This creates insecurities for the population. Often, women migrants bear the brunt. It can also lead to a higher spread of diseases, such as in the urban poor. Side walks and safe neighbourhoods contribute to the reduction of disease
• Urbanization can also lead to climate change and gentrification (influx of affluent residences and businesses, transforming the neighbourhoods to high value areas)
• The Closing the Gap report identified two areas of improvement within the policy level of global and population health. These areas are Social Protection Across the Lifecourse, and Universal Healthcare
• WHO identified social protection policy as an area of improvement as greater social security has been associated with better population health
• Barriers to implementing social security policy include limited institutional infrastructure and financial capacity in low income countries. Also, economic growth and prosperity is favoured over well-being
• In canada, language, cultural, and spiritual differences between physicians and patients is a huge barrier to healthcare for many racialized minorities in Canada
• The ABC project was a longitudinal study that followed children in disadvantages area of North Carolina for 35 years, and included a control group and a treatment group