Social Determinants of Health: Introduction

00:06 I want to start by reminding us of what cultural intelligence is.

00:09 Is the skill and ability to work effectively in multicultural settings or environments teams.

00:15 And the beauty of cultural intelligence is that it doesn't hold you to one standard.

00:21 So I often get a question about cultural competence.

00:24 And how is this different? In my opinion, competence expects people to achieve some levels that they may not be able to.

00:32 So it holds us to standards that we may not ever be able to achieve unless you're fully immersed in someone else's culture over a long period of time.

00:40 In contrast, cultural intelligence allows us flexibility.

00:45 So we're never ever going to be always in the state of a high level of cultural intelligence.

00:51 And if you remember, there are three levels - low, moderate, and high.

00:55 So depending on whether or not it's a new situation or a situation, we're not as familiar with the need to continue learning and growing, we may be in the low level, but we if we recognize that, then we're able to put in the work so that we can move up to a higher stage.

01:11 And if you will recall, there are four different parts of cultural intelligence in the framework.

01:17 So first, we want to be motivated and have an interest in working with difference.

01:22 And then secondly, we want to gain more knowledge.

01:26 That's how you become more intelligent about it by studying about those differences and trying to get comfortable in that space.

01:34 And the best way to do that as interacting.

01:37 And then thirdly, we want to have a strategy.

01:40 So if we do, we might have a faux pas, while we're interacting with people from different cultures.

01:45 But we want to make sure that we try to understand and try to embrace difference.

01:50 And then lastly, the action behind it.

01:53 So we don't want to just do all that prep work without actualizing and operationalizing those behaviors and differences.

02:01 And again, it doesn't mean you want to compromise who you really are.

02:04 You want to still continue to be yourself.

02:07 You also want to allow other people. And I hate to use that word "allow" but you want to embrace the difference and be comfortable with other people being themselves in the space.

02:19 And then, if you can't really, what's the word I'm looking for? Maybe change the situation, you can compromise.

02:27 So how can we meet with them now? In terms of social determinants of health, that's very important, because oftentimes, we label.

02:36 We talked about marginalized groups, and how stigma becomes a part of that based on our biases.

02:43 And so we're influenced by so many different things.

02:45 And we often want to label people as lazy.

02:48 That's why people don't want to work.

02:50 That's why they held this poor people don't care about their health. That's why it's poor.

02:54 When in actuality, if we talk about remember we have revisit.

02:58 What structural racism created, right? So we put people in these boxes.

03:03 When we talk about margins, think about how narrow a margin is.

03:07 So if people have a small space to operate from, then they can only achieve so much growth within that space.

03:14 It's limited to that space when you're not in a marginalized group.

03:18 And that shifts remember it's contextual.

03:21 You have space to learn grow. You have space to make more money.

03:25 You have space to buy healthy food.

03:28 So when we think about it from that context, and teach it from that context, then people are less likely to label and more likely to focus on how can we dismantle those systems that created those margins? And I say, how can we erase the margins? So what are social determinants of health? That's the popular term, I like to call it determinants of health, because some of it is not social.

03:54 Or some people call it influences of health.

03:57 But the true definition is conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affects a wide range of health, functioning, and quality of life, outcomes, and risks.

04:11 So when we think about each one of those different determinants, education and access quality.

04:17 And I'll talk about those in detail.

04:19 Healthcare access and quality.

04:23 Neighborhoods and the built environments, and then economic stability.

04:27 And all those things are influenced by the margin.

04:31 How big is the space that we have to grow in each one of those areas and to achieve optimal health?