Healthy publics: Enabling cultures and environments for health
Hinchliffe, S; Jackson, M; Wyatt, K; et al.Barlow, A; Barreto, M; Clare, L; Deplege, M; Durie, R; Fleming, L; Groom, N; Morrissey, K; Salisbury, L; Thomas, F
Date: 15 May 2018
Journal
Palgrave Communications
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Despite extraordinary advances in biomedicine and associated gains in human
health and well-being, a growing number of health and well-being related challenges have
remained or emerged in recent years. These challenges are often ‘more than biomedical’ in
complexion, being social, cultural and environmental in terms of their key ...
Despite extraordinary advances in biomedicine and associated gains in human
health and well-being, a growing number of health and well-being related challenges have
remained or emerged in recent years. These challenges are often ‘more than biomedical’ in
complexion, being social, cultural and environmental in terms of their key drivers and
determinants, and underline the necessity of a concerted policy focus on generating healthy
societies. Despite the apparent agreement on this diagnosis, the means to produce change
are seldom clear, even when the turn to health and well-being requires sizable shifts in our
understandings of public health and research practices. This paper sets out a platform from
which research approaches, methods and translational pathways for enabling health and wellbeing
can be built. The term ‘healthy publics’ allows us to shift the focus of public health away
from ‘the public’ or individuals as targets for intervention, and away from the view that culture
acts as a barrier to efficient biomedical intervention, towards a greater recognition of the
public struggles that are involved in raising health issues, questioning what counts as healthy
and unhealthy and assembling the evidence and experience to change practices and outcomes.
Creating the conditions for health and well-being, we argue, requires an engaged
research process in which public experiments in building and repairing social and material
relations are staged and sustained even if, and especially when, the fates of those publics
remain fragile and buffeted by competing and often more powerful public formations.
Psychology - old structure
Collections of Former Colleges
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