Healthy People 2020 and social determinants of health: A national policy tool for health equity or continuing inequity?

By the end of 2010, the new Healthy People 2020 program framework and objectives will be released. Public health organizations across the nation will then begin using Healthy People's recommendations to guide program implementation for eliminating health disparities and achieving health equity in the coming decade. The question is: Will Healthy People be any more successful at moving the nation toward the elimination of health disparities than it was over the past decade? Much will depend on how successfully or not the new HP2020 corrects the failure of HP2010 to integrate its hundreds of objectives into a more strategic framework for action grounded in a social determinants of health (SDOH) perspective. This presentation will examine the structure of HP2020 and discuss the degree to which it has provided the kind of strategic SDOH framework that will be likely to help public health workers and activists across the nation achieve real progress toward health equity in the decade ahead.