2011-12-13
Knowledge base for the Public Health Policy Report 2010
This report is one of several sub-reports for the “Public Health Policy Report 2010: Public health of the future – everyone’s responsibility”. Here, we provide an in-depth illustration of objective domain 1: participation and influence in society.
Individuals and groups must feel that they can influence their own living conditions and the development of society, otherwise exclusion and feelings of powerlessness arise. A lack of power and opportunities to influence matters is strongly related to illness. This report shows the development of various factors that affect health in objective domain 1, focusing on the period 2004-2009.
The factors followed up include democratic participation, social and cultural participation, access to the Internet at home, social and practical support and trust. For democratic participation, we see that there are socioeconomic differences that follow the parents’ level of education. This influences the proportion of children and adolescents that participate in various forums of influence and the proportion that votes in public elections.
Socioeconomic differences also influence young peoples’ expectations of the future. At the same time, there is a tendency for election participation to increase among young people. This report includes a new indicator that shows the proportion of people that have access to the Internet at home. In the population as a whole, this proportion has increased year by year, but there are still major differences between the old and the young, and between highly educated and those with little education.
Social and cultural participation is lower among the elderly, those born abroad and men in blue-collar professions than in the rest of the population. The results show no significant difference over time except in terms of the elderly group where participation has decreased somewhat. Above all, it is the unemployed and those on sickness benefits or an activity allowance who say that they have a low level of social participation, and the difference is up to 20 per cent between the employed and the unemployed and 30 per cent between the employed and those with sickness benefits or an activity allowance.
Gender equality in Sweden has remained high for many years, but there are still differences between the financial conditions of men and women. Self-perceived discrimination is generally dropping, but is an important illness factor for those affected.
People with disabilities need transports and buildings with adequate accessibility in order to have equal social and democratic participation. Their situation did not change appreciably during the measurement period. Trust in other people decreased somewhat in the period 2004–2009. Young people feel less trust in other people than the rest of the population.
Since 2005, the Government and other stakeholders have taken several different steps and made changes in the domain of participation and influence in society. In this sub-report, we have mainly followed up on the proposed measures presented in “Objective domain 1: Participation and influence in society – Knowledge base for the Public Health Policy Report 2005”.
Some of the measures have been fully or partially implemented, for example new anti-discrimination legislation was passed, a model for measuring gender equality is under development and steps are being taken to increase democratic participation and participation in society among adolescents, young adults and adults. In objective domain 1, the Swedish National Institute of Public Health proposes the following five measures to improve the social conditions for good health on equal terms for the entire population:
- Appoint a committee or the equivalent with the task of developing a strategy and an action plan to achieve the youth policy objectives.
- Develop a national guide as an aid in outreach and preventive home visits to the elderly.
- Deepen the knowledge of the connections between discrimination and health.
- Develop an indicator to monitor statistics on accessibility to all types of transportation for people with disabilities.
- Investigate if there are structural obstacles in society to youth participation in established democratic processes, what these obstacles are and how they can be removed
updated Monday, January 23, 2012
