Social Determinants Of Health

The World Health Organization and the Social Determinants of Health: Assessing theory, policy and practice

This major conference was held at the Wellcome Trust’s auditorium located at 183 Euston Road, London, on the 26th, 27th and 28th of November 2008; the meeting was made possible with generous support from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, the Wellcome Trust and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. Organised by the Centre for the History of Medicine in association with UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and the Global Health Histories initiative of the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva, the stated aim of the meeting was to enable well-known people involved in policy work and academia to assess the Final Report of the World Health Organization’s Commission for the Social Determinants of Health, which was released a few months earlier. The speakers and the panel chairs read the report or major sections of it, provided analyses based on their own research, and engaged in a series of fruitful discussions with a large and well informed audience.

This website aims to make available drafts of papers presented at this meeting to people interested in the important issue of the social determinants of health; additional material will be added to it regularly. All the presenters have indicated a willingness to be contacted by people keen to discuss their contributions, and we will, therefore, also make a list of e.mail addresses available to help the development of productive networks amongst academics and colleagues involved in policy design and implementation. This website will be developed over time – our plan is to keep adding important material relating to the WHO and the social determinants of health, including a series of podcasts of interviews on the importance of the social determinants of health with major players in global health.

Sanjoy Bhattacharya

Harold J. Cook

Click here for the original programme in .pdf format.

Papers*

Anne-Emanuelle Birn, University of Toronto, Canada: Slides

Cathy Campbell, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK: Slides

Rajib Dasgupta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India: Paper

Hiroyoshi Endo, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan: Paper and Slides

Amarjit Kaur, University of New England, Australia: Paper (inc slides)

Kelley Lee, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK: Paper

Michael Lewis, Salisbury University, USA: Paper and Slides

Hiroshi Nishiura, University of Utrecht, Netherlands: Slides

Diana Obregon, National University of Colombia, Bogota, Colombia: Paper

Randall Packard, Johns Hopkins University, USA: Paper and Slides

Francesca Perlman, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK: Paper and Slides

Ricardo Sabates, Institute of Education, London, UK: Paper and Slides

Abhay Shukla, Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, India: Paper

Kalinga Tudor Silva, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka: Paper

Akihito Suzuki, Keio University, Japan: Paper

Simon Szreter, University of Cambridge, UK: Paper

Togo Tsukahara, Kobe University, Japan: Paper

Kohei Wakimura, Osaka University, Japan: Paper and Slides

Comments By Chair*

Samuel Assan (Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, UK): Comments

Virginia Berridge (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK): Comments

Carla Makhlouf-Obermeyer (World Health Organization, Geneva): Comments

Anne-Marie Moulin (CEDEJ, Cairo, Egypt): Comments

Hiroshi Nishiura (Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and Nagasaki University, Japan): Comments

Eugenio Villar (World Health Organization, Geneva): Comments

*Alphabetical by author