Final Policy Brief (Critical Analysis Paper) – 15% of final policy brief grade. The purpose of this final paper is to assess your ability to coalesce the material discussed and written upon over the course of the semester. The purpose is to assess your understanding of Determinants/Social Determinants of Health as they relate to health and health policy as well as how the Social Determinants of Health framework is a unique approach compared to sociohistorical approaches that view health as causal relationships/biomedical-physiological in nature. Also, this paper aims to assess your ability to appropriately use information and literature to support a Social Determinants of Health evaluation framework by using examples of how different Social Determinants of Health specifically impact health outcomes. Additionally, you should be able to think about a “health in all policies” approach could be used to propose recommendations to policymakers, lobbyists, and decision-makers that could indirectly alleviate potential health inequities. The final critical analysis paper should be approximately 11-15 pages, not including final reference page and graphs/charts. The paper should be in standard APA style, which includes 12-point Times New Roman font, 1″ margins, and double spacing. It is important to also take time to review general rules of grammar as points could be taken off for incorrect usage. You are not expected to incorporate additional resources/references beyond those used in the course or gathered as part of your annotation assignments and in-class discussion regarding specific countries/global regions via the WHO SDOH website. The specific points should be covered in the paper are as follows (use the section lengths as only suggestions – the primary assessment criteria is to make sure that you have adequately discussed each point):
1) Introduction of health topic introduced in the class (i.e. general statistics and how it is a health concern) (for this semester the focus was on COVID-19) – 1-1.5 pp.
2) Introduction to country selected for this assignment (i.e. general statistics, demographics, possible governmental structure, and health concern statistics) 1-1.5 pp.
3) Background on potential health concern policy within selected country 1-1.5 pp.
4) Introduction of social determinants of health framework – 1-1.5 pp.
5) Suggestions on how social determinants of health are related to health topic discussed in class – bringing in supports from completed annotation assignments – (approximately 1 pg. per social determinant of health focused on in annotation assignments) – 3-4 pp.
6) Review and summary of how social determinants of health framework impact health topic/health outcomes and social determinants of health evaluation approach may be appropriate to use when address the policy presented in discussion (i.e. how social determinants of health may be more important to address compared to other influential health factors) – 2-3 pp.
7) Final reflections and next steps in how to possibly improve focal health outcome by intervening around social determinant(s) discussed in the response (this is your informed opinion and is merely hypothetical – however these recommendations should be concrete with consideration being made to a “health in all policies” approach) – 2-3 pp.
