Csillag Speaker - Dr. Andrea Rishworth

The Importance of Health Geography for Health Equity

Populations around the world are grappling with increasingly complex health challenges, ranging from growing disease burdens, new and emerging epidemics, to weak health systems. Yet the ways these challenges are experienced and their impacts for health and wellbeing are unevenly distributed geographically, within and between places and populations at local, national and international scales. This is often due to the inequitable distribution of social and structural determinants of health. The challenge is identifying the source of health inequities and generating contextually relevant solutions.

 This presentation will argue that health geography provides a critical lens to address emerging health challenges and generate equitable, place-based solutions. By drawing on case study research from Canada, the United States, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this presentation will demonstrate how a health geography lens can reveal why some people and places are healthier than others, what social, structural and environmental determinants at different scales produce uneven landscapes of health and disease, and how place-based collaboration can generate equitable health solutions.  Ultimately, this presentation focuses on why place matters for generating possibilities for health equity.