Intended for healthcare professionals
Healthier Societies for Healthier Populations
Global challenges such as the covid-19 pandemic, climate change, inequality, and ongoing economic crises undermine the health of current and future generations. They demonstrate again that the health sector alone cannot create health and wellbeing, and instead action to promote and protect health equity requires leadership across all sectors of society.
The UN’s sustainable development goal 3, to ensure healthy lives and advance wellbeing for everyone, requires the promotion of population health, the achievement of universal health coverage goals, and improving health security. But compared with UHC and health security, healthy societies as an overarching aim are insufficiently studied, theorised, and valued. A resulting lack of consensus on how to create and sustain these greener, more equitable, and more sustainable societies limits efforts to develop and implement healthier policies and to improve population health.
A new BMJ Collection on Healthier Societies for Healthier Populations, which includes examples from Thailand and cities in Africa, aims to stimulate debate among policymakers, researchers, and communities on how to create healthy societies by considering the political economy, whole of society approaches, and social movements. It was done in partnership with the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research.
The Collection shows that governments and other societal actors must steward a multisectoral approach to build and maintain equitable, greener, and sustainable societies that benefit everyone. The health sector is just one actor among the many that needs to act to create healthy societies around the world. Still, leaders and members of the health sector must use their influence across all policy making areas at every level, including local, national, and supranational governance.
Analysis
Can current interlinked crises stimulate the structural and policy choices required for healthy societies?
Kumanan Rasanathan and colleagues argue that governments and other societal actors, including the health sector, must ensure current global crises lead to choices and action to build healthy societies that enhance social, economic, and environmental equity and sustainability.
Future proofing health in response to climate change and rapid urbanisation in Africa
Community oriented, integrated climate and health systems should include Indigenous knowledge systems and capitalise on Africa’s young demographic, harnessing mobile technology to unleash a cadre of youth community climate health workers, argue Monika Kamkuemah and colleagues.
Opinion
Tying health taxes to health promotion is popular and effective in Thailand
The ringfencing of alcohol and tobacco consumption taxes for spending on health promotion has coincided with reductions in risk factors for non-communicable disease, the ThaiHealth programme shows, write Viroj Tangcharoensathien, Prakit Vathesatogkit, and Supakorn Buasai.
Regulate industry in all economic sectors to achieve health for all
Healthy societies depend on governments aligning economic development with population and planetary health, writes Mariana Mazzucato.
This Collection was commissioned following a proposal by the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research (an international partnership hosted by the World Health Organization). It follows the Healthier Societies for Healthier Populations dialogues in 2020-2022 organised by Wilton Park (an executive agency of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office), the government of Sweden, and the Alliance. The Alliance, with the support of the government of Sweden, provided funding for the Collection, including open access fees. The BMJ commissioned, peer reviewed, edited, and made the decision to publish these articles. The lead editor was Richard Hurley for The BMJ.
