Health Promotion International, Vol. 14, No. 3, 281-283,
September 1999
© Oxford University Press 1999
Resource Review |
Measuring Progress
R. Eckersley, CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria, 1998
Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care, Canberra, Australia The last decade of the 20th Century has seen a flourishing of research which has placed the relationship between health and the social environment on much firmer ground than in the past. Researchers, e.g. Michael Marmot and Richard Wilkinson in the UK, Ichiro Kawachi and George Kaplan in the USA, and Clyde Hertzman and Fraser Mustard in Canada—among many others—are providing powerful new evidence of the impact of social conditions on health. They have shown, e.g. that societies and communities that are fairer, more socially cohesive and inclusive almost invariably have healthier populations than those that do not share these characteristics.
These findings are clearly not new or surprising; health promotion advocates have argued that this is the case since well before the Ottawa Charter. But the evidence is now stronger and supported not only by large-scale epidemiological studies but also by