What are social determinants of health? Explain how social determinants of health contribute to the development of disease. Describe the fundamental idea that the communicable disease chain model is designed to represent. Give an example of the steps a nurse can take to break the link within the communicable disease chain.
Resources within your text covering international/global health, and the websites in the topic materials, will assist you in answering this discussion question.
Answer preview
People’s various interactions with their social and physical environments are the main reason behind poor health outcomes. For example, in areas prone to high air pollution cases, the ozone layer is interfered with, leading to outbreaks of diseases such as asthma in both children and adults. Addressing such health determinants paves the way to implementing health equity, which advocates for the attainment of full health potential to all regardless of one’s social position (Artiga & Hinton 2019). Understanding the spread of infectious diseases by agents is made easy by the communicable disease chain model, which holds the ideology that individuals can break chains of infection at any point, thus enabling the containment of a disease. In breaking such a chain of infectious diseases, there are several advisable steps to follow.
[384 Words]