Delivered. It is a plea for “social health” that a group of academics delivers to us, over a hundred pages. Behind these two terms, the concept, which also serves as the title of the work coordinated by Nicolas Duvoux and Nadège Vezinat, professors of sociology at the University of Paris-VIII, represents for the two authors both a ” challenge “ and an ” need “. They thus call to connect two universes “have so far remained too separated (…) by linking more openness to social rights and social support with therapy”.
The context of the health crisis came to support their vision. “The demonstration of a link between health, social inequalities and segregation dynamics has highlighted the need for a social and preventive turn in health policies”according to them. “The rediscovery of the interdependence between members of society will have been one of the main lessons of the Covid-19 health crisis”, they judge, citing “ differentiated exposure to contamination and mortality”, or “unequal access to vaccination “.
These social inequalities in health, well known to the medical world, have exploded into broad daylight on the simple observation of mortality rates due to the epidemic, which are much higher in disadvantaged neighborhoods with cramped housing, more exposed professions or even whose populations suffer more than others from comorbidities. It is again the much lower vaccination rates in popular territories that have come to illustrate them.
Result: this other way of approaching health – which is neither the “social medicine” nor reducible to the concept of ” public health “, heard most often only in a collective aspect – requires an opening “out of care”, say the researchers. And to cite examples such as the fact of offering adapted physical activity or the setting up of “cooking” workshops for diabetics.
The track of the medical employee
The demonstration, sometimes a little arid on the theoretical level, comes to be embodied through the examination of the numerous experiments which seek to implement these principles placing “social objectives at the heart of their purpose”. It is these municipalities which open health centres, these liberal doctors who come together in multi-professional health centres, or even these hospitals which have “health care access points”, combining general medicine consultations coupled with social work aimed at opening up social rights to patients.
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