What makes some people healthy and others unhealthy?
How can we create a society in which everyone has a chance to live a long, healthy life?
Healthy People 2020 is exploring these questions by:
Developing objectives that address the relationship between health status and biology, individual behavior, health services, social factors, and policies.
Emphasizing an ecological approach to disease prevention and health promotion. An ecological approach focuses on both individual-level and population-level determinants of health and interventions.
About Determinants of Health
The range of personal, social, economic, and environmental factors that influence health status are known as determinants of health.
Determinants of health fall under several broad categories:
Policymaking
Social factors
Health services
Individual behavior
Biology and genetics
It is the interrelationships among these factors that determine individual and population health. Because of this, interventions that target multiple determinants of health are most likely to be effective. Determinants of health reach beyond the boundaries of traditional health care and public health sectors; sectors such as education, housing, transportation, agriculture, and environment can be important allies in improving population health.
