Employment as a social determinant of health. Its application in undergraduate education.

Abstract

This article studies the assessment that students of the speech therapy program (UNR) give to training in relation to the determinants of health. In particular, employment and its connection with health in general and with healthy communication in particular are analyzed. A questionnaire was applied using the Google form with closed and open questions, whose answers were coded based on semantic similarity. Firstly, the results of the interviews with the students who took part in this research (n 28) show that all of them state that the level of employment (unemployed, underemployed, employed) of the population is linked to their health; and that justify this assertion based on the impact of working conditions on the health of the population, referring to the quality of life/basic needs satisfied that allow access to work, access to health systems (which in our country are links to health subsystems) and to the characteristics of the work environment. In addition, it was analyzed in which situations they consider that a person’s health is affected; Therefore, the most selected options were: “physical, mental and/or emotional discomfort”, “his well-being is altered” and “he has unsatisfied basic needs Finally, 23 of them assume that their knowledge on the subject is regular, 3 students consider that their level of knowledge is good and 2 of them consider it insufficient. We conclude that employment is linked to health, and in particular there are occupations that constitute a population at risk for speech-language pathologies. It is considered that working from the first years of training within the framework of the social determinants of health constitutes a fundamental tool to train graduates with a comprehensive view of the subjects of care.