Sociology In Health And Social Care Essay

Overtime, sociology has played an essential role in the aid of healthcare policies and procedures, along with playing a fundamental role in one’s understanding of health inequalities. This paper explores how sociology has played such a role in healthcare, whilst including discussions regarding the influence of social structures and inequalities in the health of an individual, their family and community, with the topic of health variations between social classes being the main focus of the discussion. A structured overview, review and evaluation of a specific health policy in the UK will also be provided within this paper.
Sociology in healthcare.
Sociology can be defined in a number of ways, due to its almost limitless scope (Denny, Earle,

Sharp (1994) was one of the first to critic the idea of the inclusion of sociology within nursing practice, arguing that nursing as a whole is a “action-orientated profession”, therefore nurses should only be concerned with the knowledge of how to perform tasks, rather than acquiring the theoretical knowledge of sociology. However, Porter (1995) was in favour of this inclusion, arguing that health not determined on the assessment of an individual’s physical state, but can in fact be determined by factors such as social and cultural, factors in which nurses should both be educated in and understand. Porter goes on to explain that in turn, this would allow nurses to care for patients in a holistic and individualised

Present day sociology research confirms this link, as in 2002-2006 the gap between those in classes one and seven had increased to 5.8 years, whereas the that between classes one and three had declined to 1.9 years (Office for National Statistics,