Global health in public policy: finding the right frame?

Abstract

One of health promotion's major contributions has been its discursive challenge to biomedical and even behavioural models of health and illness. The concept of social determinants of health is now widely accepted by health authorities in many parts of the world. When health promoters focus on these determinants, however, it is often at local or national scales. Contemporary globalisation demands a more critical appraisal of how many health problems have become inherently global in cause and consequence. In making such an appraisal, it is helpful to consider how global health is presently being framed to determine which arguments are most likely to be health-promoting for the greatest number. This article reviews five such frames: health as security, as development, as global public good, as commodity, and as human right. Most offer some useful argumentation to health promotion, although the rights-based frame, when supported by ethical reasoning (a moral voice), is the most consistent with health promotion's more empowering roots.

Social exclusion, health and hidden homelessness

“…26 Improving the treatment, outreach, networking, and housing supports, by adopting an approach to help ensure that programs and interventions are adequately funded and sustainable. 3,47 As funding for health and social policy changes are developed, evaluation of these changes by clients using the services 45,48,49 would reduce barriers and improve the social environments, health behaviours and overall health status for people experiencing hidden homelessness.…”

The changing landscape of global public health

“…As in any field undergoing such rapid and transformative change, the pace of events and the implementation of new initiatives often threaten to move more quickly than the capacity of the field to reflect upon its most basic assumptions and to reorganise itself in order to provide the conceptual and structural foundations for its continued development (Frenk et al 2011 and cross-sectoral, multi-problem unified solutions; and about the probable outcome and possible response to major environmental shifts, such as global climate change, as well as to major economic events such as the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. In turn, these questions have been linked to important, but largely unresolved, debates about both the possibilities and the potential limitations of technological advances aimed at confronting global health challenges and about the need for farreaching changes to create and strengthen health systems that most effectively address twenty-first century health needs, and to reorganise models of development cooperation to more effectively address global health priorities in the future (Labonté 2008).…”

Framing the National Interest: Debating Intellectual Property and Access to Essential Medicines in Kenya

“…Scholars have developed refined studies of framing strategies deployed at international level in the area of health governance (e.g. Labonté, , p. 467). They have shown, for example, how the globalized IPR regime and the United Nations corpus of human rights law provided a grammar and an idiom with “transcultural resonance” for the conduct of debates over access to medicines (Keck and Sikkink, , p. 200).…”