Promoting the health of vulnerable populations: Three steps towards a systems-based re-orientation of public health intervention research

Understanding the system dynamics of obesity-related behaviours in 10- to 14-year-old adolescents in Amsterdam from a multi-actor perspective

“…Another potential important perspective to take into account is that of stakeholders ( 6 ). Friel et al ( 10 ) for example conducted collaborative conceptual modelling workshops with stakeholders from different sectors in Australia including academia, non-governmental health organizations and government to create a system map that illustrated the multiple factors associated with inequities in healthy eating.…”

“…One way of developing a system understanding is through system mapping. A frequently used mapping tool is the causal loop diagram (CLD) (5)(6)(7). Such diagrams provide visual representations of the complexity of a problem, depicted in the form of factors, causal relationships, polarity and feedback loops (8).…”

“…Friel et al (10) for example conducted collaborative conceptual modelling workshops with stakeholders from different sectors in Australia including academia, non-governmental health organizations and government to create a system map that illustrated the multiple factors associated with inequities in healthy eating. This system map resulted in the identification of seven sub-systems including (1) food supply and environment; (2) transport, (3) housing and the built environment, (4) employment, (5) social protection, (6) health literacy, and (7) food preferences. One more potential important perspective to consider is that of the targeted group itself, often identified through methods such as group model building (GMB) (11)(12)(13)(14).…”

Mental Health Promotion and Illness Prevention in Vulnerable Populations

“…Several cases of social and health inequity have occurred in recent centuries. Despite major innovations and significant changes in the general population’s quality of life, the most vulnerable populations continued to survive [ 1 ]. Vulnerability is a general concept that, in the context of health, means susceptibility to developing a certain health problem.…”

Embracing complexity : Unravelling mechanisms in health promotion in the Healthy Futures Nearby programme

“…The outcomes were nevertheless specified at the individual, behavioural level and in terms of perceived health. The discrepancy between a combined focus on wider social determinants of health with assumed outcomes on health-related behaviour at the individual level resonates with what is known as 'lifestyle drift' in policymaking: 'the tendency for policy to start off recognizing the need for action on upstream social determinants of health only to shift downstream to focus largely on lifestyle factors' (Popay, Whitehead, & Hunter, 2010;Rod et al, 2023).…”