Having done this research now for a while coming to a social determinants of health research environment here at UBC and having worked in this field for many years the one thing that strikes me, I think stronger and stronger as I go along, is the universal presence of a very, very strong socioeconomic gradient of health. And it brings up questions about equity and fairness in our society. If you live in Vancouver, and I guess it\u2019s the same for some other places within Canada, historically and geographically speaking we\u2019re living in a time of plenty, on average. But we also live in times where child poverty rates are terrifyingly high. There are twenty percent, plus minus depending on how you do the counting, in BC and also in the same ballpark in other provinces. And the question is how do we as a society allow that one in five children live in poverty because we know what the dire consequences are when you look at long term consequences of poverty in terms of disrupted \u2013 sometimes \u2013 sleep patterns, access to nutrition, exposure to environmental pollutants and there\u2019s a whole sequence that\u2019s associated \u2013 it\u2019s not necessarily causally determined by poverty \u2013 but it\u2019s associated with it. You look at some populations in single parent families, sixty percent of those children live in poverty and the poverty rates for aboriginal children are absolutely shocking and the question is if we look at the values you ask any Canadian on the street and ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s one of your values?\u201d and they\u2019ll say equity and fairness. But that\u2019s not the society in which we live. But we do have all the resources we need to make this a more equitable society. So one of the underlying fundamental goals of our work is to shine the light on the inequity that we see and to motivate people to take action on it because there\u2019s a lot that can be done. Denmark has basically eliminated childhood poverty. They\u2019re not richer than Canada as a country, they\u2019re not smarter than Canadians but they have a history of looking at policy decisions that said \u201cwe want to eliminate childhood poverty\u201d and they have done it and there\u2019s no reason for Canada not to do that. So I hope that by keep pushing, keep shining a light on inequity and the consequences for us as a society, whether it\u2019s the well-being of children right now, which is really, really important, but also the long term consequences of living up \u2013 living \u2013 growing up in those kinds of experience, how detrimental they are for our society, so that\u2019s my main hope with this type of work. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Having done this research now for a while coming to a social determinants of health research environment here at UBC and having worked in this field for many years the one thing that strikes me, I think stronger and stronger as I go along, is the universal presence of a very, very strong socioeconomic gradient […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2561","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2561"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2562,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2561\/revisions\/2562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}