Health Policies, Social Factors and Health
Health Policies, Social Factors and Health Introduction
Health policies are the policies taken in a certain society in order to attain given health goals like diagnosis, prevention and treatment of various diseases and illness. Social factors are based on the behavioral attitude and practices of the society. Such factors may include the culture of a given society, the stress on the consumption of certain dishes. These factors normally affect the health condition of members of the society in very many ways, some resulting positively, others negatively. They can also refer to an insurance policy cover offered to individual citizens of the country involved.
The health policies include activities such as encouraging the scientific and technological research in areas such as biomedical, social as well as behavioral sciences. It also takes into consideration the improvement of access to health information to the public. As much as an annual financial budget is concerned, the health sector is supposed to be considered first when the funds are being dispatched. Being ready to offer incentives to non-governmental organizations that are willing to improve health in a given nation is also a crucial policy in the health sector. This is done to attract many of such important supportive well wishers to a nation (Willerson, 2004).
These health policies have a significant effect on the social lifestyles of societal occupants. When the health policy makers come up with irrelevant and unnecessary poor health policies, the health conditions will automatically become worse. Poor or lack of proper information to women on the appropriate measures to take during childbirth can constitute to numerous fatal health hazards such as death of the fetus or the mother. Besides, it also results to premature birth, which usually has undesirable effects to the fetus. Death of mothers leaving behind the children leads to increased number of orphans in the society, hence retardation in the economic growth. The population is growing at a higher rate, therefore, health facilities like hospitals are at an increasing demand. As imposed by the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Proper medical care is a right to all human beings, the execution of these rights is, therefore, crucial to the citizens of a particular country (Kelley, 1994).
High tax on medicinal drugs discourages the dealers of this commodity, and also leads to a corresponding increase in prices of drugs to a level that a common middle and low-earning citizen cannot afford. Since the demographic and economic structure of many nations reveals a high and dense population of this class of people, majority of them suffer a lot and many may die due to this. Licensing of personalities in businesses related to the provision of health services should not be cumbersome to ensure many health institutions in a given area. An action by a serious government to impose a mandatory and national health insurance policy help solve the problem of lack of funds to access the available medical services. However, lack of such policies results to death of many citizens (May, 1994).
Conclusion
Generally, imposition of these policies on the entire population will ensure tremendous increase in the life expectancy of the people. This will in turn lead to an increase in manpower of the nation in question hence national development. Introduction of national insurance policies has brought about a desirable change in the overall growth to many nations where these policies are applicable. Nonetheless, public health funding is sometimes not encouraged since it leads to overuse of medical services consequently raising the net cost of these services. It has also hindered utilization of new technology to come up with methods of approaching some life threatening diseases like cancer which has of the recent past claimed the lives of many individuals globally.
