Healthy People 2030: SDOH

In the United States (US), the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) embodied the ideas put in place by the WHO, and Health People 2020, the US federal plan for building a healthier nation, included social determinants of health in its goals and objectives. Healthy People 2030 outlines five key areas of Social Determinants of Health (SDOH):

• Healthcare Access and Quality – The connection between people’s access to and understanding of health services and their own health. This domain includes key issues such as access to healthcare, access to primary care, health insurance coverage, and health literacy.

• Education Access and Quality – The connection of education to health and wellbeing. This domain includes key issues such as graduating from high school, enrollment in higher education, educational attainment in general, language and literacy, and early childhood education and development.
• Social and Community Context – The connection between characteristics of the contexts within which people live, learn, work, and play and their health and wellbeing. This includes cohesion within a community, civic participation, discrimination, conditions in the workplace, and incarceration.
• Economic Stability – The connection between the financial resources people have – income, cost of living, and socioeconomic status – and their health. This area includes key issues such as poverty, employment, food security, and housing stability.
• Neighborhood and Built Environment – The connection between where a person lives – housing, neighborhood, and environment – and their health and wellbeing. This includes topics like the quality of housing, access to transportation, availability of healthy foods, air and water quality, and neighborhood crime and violence.