Understanding Health

Understanding Health, fourth edition, introduces students to all of the key health disciplines, examining public health, health promotion, social determinants of health and primary health care as a means of achieving greater fairness, social justice and health equity. It provides an update of important new developments in determinants thinking and adds new material on how to take action on the social determinants of health from whatever your field of endeavour with an emphasis on the evidence for better health and equity. It takes a more practical approach and looks at strategies for improving health practice.

The structure of the book begins by discussing the over-arching principles of health and health promotion and continues on to explore how health status and the determinants of health are measured. The book then covers how health is shaped by the determinants of health, and finally, how to use that knowledge to improve health. The book equips the students to explore the theories and helps them to understand how to put them into practice. The extensive pedagogy highlights important theory, research and practice into the concepts covered within the text.