The Centre’s Val Morrison led this workshop at the 2016 Canadian Public Health Association (CPHA’s) annual conference in Toronto from June 13-16. This workshop was potentially of interest to public health actors whose work touches on questions of health inequalities and health equity as well as those interested in policy approaches in public health.
This workshop was intended to enable public health actors to more easily distinguish between the most widespread policy approaches that have been proposed to reduce health inequalities. These approaches are:
- Political economy,
- Macro social policies,
- Intersectionality,
- Life course,
- Settings approach,
- Approaches that aim at living conditions,
- Those that target communities, and
- Approaches aimed at individuals.
We set out to clarify how these different approaches are grounded theoretically, how they affect inequalities differently, and how adopting one or the other can impact attempts to reduce health inequalities.
By the end of the workshop, participants were able to:
- Differentiate between seven different policy approaches to reducing health inequalities.
- Classify each approach as acting on either the determinants of health or the determinants of health inequalities.
- Illustrate how adopting one or another of the policy approaches will affect the potential reduction of health inequalities differently.
