[Moral dilemmas around health equity].

From the perspective of social justice and equality of opportunity, it is an important yet difficult aim of local governments to enhance the opportunity to be healthy among disadvantaged groups. Apart from a lack of knowledge about effective interventions, there can be uncertainty about what is the best thing to do. To get a better understanding of what these moral challenges are, we made an inventory of the ethical dilemmas faced by employees of the public health department of the Dutch City of Utrecht in their aspiration to achieve health equity.

How to support equal standing in local health equity?

Attempts to decrease socioeconomic health disparities face various challenges, which include ethical questions about prioritization and value-conflicts. To deal with these questions in a way that takes equal standing as a central value, this paper explores the potential of a relational egalitarian capability approach to local health equity policies. Especially for local health equity policies, a relational egalitarian capability approach seems promising as it offers more perspectives for action and evaluation additional to considerations of distributive justice.

A Practice-Oriented Review of Health Concepts.

Whereas theories on health generally argue in favor of one specific concept, we argue that, given the variety of health practices, we need different concepts of health. We thus approach health concepts as a Wittgensteinian family of thick concepts. By discussing five concepts of health offered by (philosophical) theory, we argue that all capture something that seems relevant when we talk and think about health.

Do conceptualisations of health differ across social strata? A concept mapping study among lay people.

Objectives: The legitimacy of policies that aim at tackling socioeconomic inequalities in health can be challenged if they do not reflect the conceptualisations of health that are valued in all strata. Therefore, this study analyses how different socioeconomic groups formulate their own answers regarding: what does health mean to you?

Design: Concept mapping procedures were performed in three groups that differ in educational level. All procedures followed exactly the same design.