Abstract
Understanding social inequalities in health is of great importance; it provides the conceptual frame for investigating the social factors that affect health, together with empirical evidence for improving population health. Individual and socioeconomic data, disease related conditions and self rated health (SRH) ratings were collected from a representative sample of 1,000 participants in order to study health inequalities in Greece. 20.8% of men and 37.2% of women reported poor health status. Significant inequalities in SRH were observed. Strong associations of poor SRH with gender, age, insurance coverage and chronic diseases were identified. Social insurance scheme captured partly the effects of educational level, income and residence area in SRH in multivariate analysis. Respondents under chronic treatment and those suffering from cardiovascular, musculoskeletal and neurological/psychiatric disorders exhibited the highest risk of reporting poor SRH. Our findings provide decision-makers with insights into how to manage health inequalities by prioritizing preventive measures and consequently, progress towards the fair distribution of healthcare resources.
Highlights
Understanding and acting on social health inequalities has proven to be a difficult task
The aim of the present study was to explore the associations of a series of potential socio-demographic and disease related determinants with self rated health (SRH) and to identify socioeconomic health inequalities
Health ratings of the Greek population are in accordance with the Western Europe population profile which is between 20% and 55%, while in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union countries poor SRH lies around 70% [16,17]
Summary
Understanding and acting on social health inequalities has proven to be a difficult task. Under the increasingly broad array of psychosocial and environmental risk factors for health, it is recognized that understanding further the social and economic forces which shape individual socioeconomic position will provide additional insight and tools for social action. Within this framework, medical care and insurance, social relationships, roles and activities are considered major explanatory variables on the causal pathway between socioeconomic status and various health outcomes. Other factors are related to the processes of measurement of ill-health, to socio-economic conditions and material well-being, social class structure and selection, lifestyle behavior and to biomedical, cultural, psychosocial, psychological and environmental explanations [1,2,3,4]. It has been argued that, materialist and behavioural explanations cannot be separated, abandoning the effort to make any distinction between the two would not help in the etiology for inequalities in health [4]
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