What is the definition of the word "health"? Today we discussed a little more about what each of us thought this word mean't. This then prompted us into a discussion about the definition of "health equity" and also the touchy topic of "is health a right". So how exactly does one decide what the perfect definition of health is? To figure this out we dove a little bit into some health organizations and what they considered the word to mean.
We first went into the definition reported by WHO (World Health Organization).
"A state of complete physical, mental, and social well being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."
While this definition seems to do a good job covering healthcare it seems to be missing a few specifics. As a class we decided that while the definition covers a lot, it still does not cover any ideas related to the teaching and maintaining of healthy living. In class we have been discussing how healthcare has moved a lot from a treatment based health system to a preventative health based system. For this reason we had some edits to the WHO definition. Looking at CDC's definition,
"A state of complete physical mental and social well being and the absence of sickness or frailty"
This definition also failed to mention any ideas on the awareness of health. If the health industry is taking a more preventative step toward the future, shouldn't the definition of health change as well? These definitions also lack any sort of idea about the individual and focus more on everyone as the same group. It doesn't come as a shock that different people of different age groups, races, geographic locations, etc. need different medical support. Going off of this we provided our own definition. We chose "A balanced state of physical, mental, and social well being that the individual has established for themselves along with an understanding of healthy living ideas and prevention."
We also discussed a lot of different definitions of Health Equity. This definition also brought a lot of difficulty for us to define. A lot of definitions that we found addressed what they referred to as a "need", but what is a "need"? Need seems like it could be a very biased word to put into a definition like this. What one person thinks they need another person may not. The same was also true for any definition that included the words, "unfair", "unjust", or "unavoidable". What is unjust? What is unfair? Our group really wanted to look at this definition from a designers standpoint so we agreed upon the definition, "Equal utilization and distribution according to equal access to promote equal health outcomes. "
This is when it gets hard because even in our own definition there were possibly biased or un-calculatable words included. I don't think it was till this point that most of us had even been asked to define what "health" or "health equity" was. It was also the first time that we all realized how hard these words were to define. If the words are hard to define then we have to also realize that the programs (architecturally) that make them up are also difficult to define and place. This was an eye opener to a lot of us in the class on how exactly architects design for healthcare as well as the struggles on developing healthcare facilities in different areas with different economic status's. We should be in for quite the ride this semester!
Image Credits: https://www.franchiseindia.com//uploads/content/fi/art/diagnosing-the-beauty-of-wellnes-fb3db511fc.jpg
Comentários