Rights Based Approaches to Public Health Systems

A rights-based approach to public health systems focuses on underlying determinants of health – the economic, political, and social systems that determine health status and have far greater impact on health than the provision of medicine. With an understanding that health vulnerability is societally structured, this presentation analyzes the role of human rights in structuring equity-based public health systems, including policy frameworks to protect and promote health through, for example: clean water and air, food, shelter, energy, sanitation, education, employment, wealth, health infrastructures, social stability, and security from violence and discrimination. Finding international human rights to offer a powerful policy discourse to address underlying determinants of health through public health systems, this research examines the evolution of the human right to health to respond to threats to the public's health – from a right to medical interventions to a right to all those underlying conditions that structure health. Through a comparative review of rights-based approaches to determinants of health in national public health systems throughout the world, this research outlines the structural determinants of health amenable to amelioration through policy development and reform. Given the rising importance of these underlying determinants of health in contemporary human rights discourse, the presentation concludes by assessing the current health care reform debate in national and global health policy, proposing components of a rights-based public health system that can encompass those structural determinants bearing the greatest impact on the realization of the right to health.