Fair Society Healthy Lives

The final report of the World Health Organization Commission on the Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), published in 2008, affirmed that social injustice was killing on a grand scale, with a toxic combination of 'poor social policies and programmes, unfair economic arrangements, and bad politics' being responsible for producing and reinforcing health inequalities. It provided a comprehensive evidence-based discussion of pervasive inequalities of health in many countries, demonstrating the presence of a social gradient in health outcomes associated with the unfair distribution of the social determinants of health. The social determinants of health include the conditions in which people are born, grow, live,…