The Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations featured the Network’s Partnerships for Health Equity and Opportunity: A Healthcare Playbook for Community Developers in the 2019 Vital Signals issues. Read the issue here.
What does it mean for a community to be healthy? When you think about it, health is so much more than not being sick. A healthy community accounts for all the elements that affect our lives, including shelter, education, food, decent income, justice, dignity, and access to whatever people might require to fulfill their needs. These factors are known as the social determinants of health. Our health care system, however, has not shared this holistic view, instead seeing health as an issue of disease treatment and prevention. Because sickness and access to health care are just a small part of our overall health and well-being, this narrow view has resulted in trillions—yes, trillions—of health care dollars spent on treating avoidable chronic disease, with little improvement in our overall population’s health.