World Health Organisation Commission on Social Determinants of Health Measurement and Evidence Knowledge Network the Development of the Evidence Base about the Social Determinants of Health

In 2005, the Director General of the WHO set up a global Commission on the Social Determinants of Health (CSDH). The objective of the Commission was to achieve policy change by learning from existing knowledge about the social determinants of health (SDH) and turning that learning into global and national political and economic action. To facilitate the learning a number of Knowledge Networks (KNs) were established by WHO to synthesize knowledge about the social determinants of health. This paper has been prepared by one of those knowledge networks viz. the Measurement and Evidence Knowledge Network. The purpose of this paper is to articulate a series of methodological, theoretical and epistemological principles that will help to inform the development of the evidence base about the social determinants of health which all the Knowledge Networks will be working to construct. Solar and Irwin (2005) developed a discussion paper for the CSDH 'Towards a conceptual framework for analysis and action on the social determinants of health' to set out the conceptual foundations for the work of the Commission. It put forward a schema (drawn from existing models and frameworks) for the social determinants of health which aimed to: • clarify the mechanisms by which social determinants generate health inequities • show how the major determinants relate to each other • provide a framework for evaluating which social determinants of health are the most important to address • map specific levels of intervention and policy entry points for action. The framework also highlighted three key issues that need to be addressed if effective action is to be taken on the social determinants of health: 1. to distinguish between the structural (e.g. income and education) and intermediate (e.g. living and working conditions, population behaviour, food availability) determinants of health; 4 2. to understand and make explicit what is meant by the socio-political context (encompassing a broad set of structural, cultural and functional aspects of the social system which impacts on individuals); 3. to take account of the actions that need to be taken at different levels (macro, meso, micro) in order that inequalities in health can be tackled (i.e. to alter the configuration of underlying social stratification, and those policies and interventions that target intermediate health determinants). The present paper considers a number of intellectual principles which need to be articulated in order to tackle the issues identified by Solar and Irwin. Globally there have …