Social Bases of Health: Global Perspectives

This unit exposes students to sociological approaches to health, wellbeing and disease and asks questions such as: who gets sick, who is healthy, how diseases are understood, and how health care practices are distributed and organised. Health and wellbeing are considered from individual and population perspectives with a particular focus on the social distribution and patterning of health and illness, inequalities in health, experiences of health and illness and the politics of health care.The unit focuses on both the Australian and global health contexts and students will participate in a ‘public sociology’ project to engage with sociological knowledge about health and suggest ways to improve health outcomes among at-risk groups using a social model of health.