In a significant development aimed at promoting health equity worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) has unveiled a groundbreaking operational framework for monitoring social determinants of health equity and actions addressing them. This vital new guidance, designed to support evidence-based policymaking, underscores the urgent need to address the underlying social factors that impact health outcomes.
For patients and patient advocacy organizations, this new guidance represents a crucial step towards achieving the goal of enabling everyone, everywhere, to attain the highest possible standard of health and well-being. The conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age, collectively known as the social determinants of health, profoundly influence individuals’ health and well-being. However, these same factors often drive health inequities within and across countries.
Recent global crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and widespread conflict, have further exacerbated these inequities, highlighting the pressing need for governments to prioritize efforts to address the social determinants of health and rebuild societies in ways that benefit everyone.
Dr. Etienne Krug, Director of the Department for Social Determinants of Health at WHO, emphasized the importance of systematically identifying and eliminating inequities to uphold the fundamental human right to health. The operational framework provides a clear and practical pathway for governments to achieve this goal, offering guidance on monitoring social determinants of health equity, including a menu of indicators and step-by-step processes for technical monitoring.
Despite previous commitments and efforts to address social determinants of health, progress remains insufficient. To ensure that actions taken to address these determinants are effective, governments require accurate, timely, and comparable data. The operational framework, along with the forthcoming world report on social determinants of health equity, spearheads renewed efforts to address these critical issues.
As patient advocates, we stand in solidarity with WHO’s commitment to advancing health equity and creating fairer societies. We urge governments to prioritize the implementation of this operational framework and utilize it to inform policies that promote health equity at national and subnational levels.
For more information and details on the new guidance, please visit the official WHO news release here.