Tackling Health Inequity Using Primary Health Care and Empowerment Approaches

Tackling Health Inequity Using Primary Health Care and Empowerment Approaches

Introduction

The huge inequalities in access to health threatening social stability and security, warned the World Health Organization (WHO), noting that life expectancy in rich countries can be up to 40 years than in poor. The annual report of the WHO, dedicated this year to assess primary health care in the world, gives very critical findings about how increased health imbalances between countries and between population groups within a State. Thus, public expenditure on health ranges from $20 per person per year in some countries up to $ 6,000 in others. In the middle and lower income, a total of 5000 600 million people have to cover out of pocket half of all medical expenses, which, added to the increasingly high costs of medical care, each year brings more than 100 million people below the poverty threshold. The differences in access are also shocking, says WHO, citing the case of Nairobi, where the mortality rate among children under five years is 15 per thousand in affluent areas of the city, while the slums is 254. "The data are indicative of a situation in which many health systems have lost their orientation fair access to care, their ability to invest resources wisely and to meet the needs of people, particularly the poor," says the report of the UN body (Kim & Richardson, 2012).

Discussion

Social groups are primed more inequality

In general, mainly affects the most exploited, oppressed or excluded from society. That is, in the poorest workers in most exploited social classes (e.g. precarious employment), among the most oppressed, e.g. unemployed poor women living alone with their children, the unemployed without resources, or poor illegal immigrants who are denied work, among the excluded, homeless or at serious social marginalization (Plug, et. al., 2012). Inequality also has a geographic component as these social groups often live in the most "marginalized" suffering exploitation, exclusion and multiple social oppression: they have fewer financial resources and less political power, have worse health care and social services, and are more exposed to risk factors harmful to health, whether they are of a social nature (violence), employment (layoffs, low wages), or environmental (pollution).

As noted, the phenomenon of inequality in health is a widespread phenomenon and important yet surprisingly little-known issue. Although recent decades have seen remarkable progress in the knowledge generated through social epidemiology and public health, the catalog of oversights to tackling health inequalities seems endless. It can be summarized in the following points. First, even today in many countries there is hardly any studies that describe health inequality. For example, many middle-income countries and low do not have or do not devote sufficient resources to deal with the often expensive studies on health inequalities can be done in other rich countries. Paradoxically, it is in many of these countries occur greater social inequalities, for example in China (Berry & Bell, 2012). Second, other times there but these studies do not analyze ...