We Must Promote Health Equity in Spite of Current Economic Challenges

When the Whitehall Studies were first published, they identified not only a social gradient that correlated the relationship between social status and life expectancy, but new variables to consider when predicting population health outcomes. These variables included the economic, social, and physical environments in which people live. The Whitehall Studies and subsequent research provide strong evidence that former health promotion and disease prevention efforts, which focused on access to and affordability of healthcare services, were myopic because they did not consider the reasons people became sick in the first place. This paradigm shift encouraged an “upstream” approach, or consideration of root causality, so that health policy development would inc