Building Integrated and Coordinated Health Systems: Addressing the Social Determinants of Health

Dear Colleagues, 

Health systems struggle to provide integrated and timely healthcare at a population level. COVID-19 magnified the stark inequities in health and care globally, disproportionately impacting vulnerable groups, including people with disabilities, people from lower socio-economic groups, people who are homeless, migrants and refugees, and older people with limited mobility. All these groups carry greater risk for acute and chronic health challenges. They often fail to gain timely access to needed care, and integrated and continued, needs-matched support, especially in community and primary care settings.

Unrecognized social determinants of health (SDOH) account for many pressures. The World Health Organization (2022) acknowledges the role and influence of SDOH on unfair and unavoidable differences in health inequity and, in particular, their contribution to emergency and unscheduled hospital admissions.

This Special Issue aims to attract papers building the evidence base considering the social determinants of health in the development of integrated, accessible, affordable, and coordinated health provider systems for vulnerable groups.

We seek papers that contribute to the understanding of the existing focus on the social determinants of health, what data are being examined, and what the cumulative effect is.

We encourage the submission of a broad range of studies and evidence. This Special Issue invites researchers of any discipline who focus on health inequity, including but not limited to social science, public health, nursing, law, and medicine, to submit their work.

We will consider the following types of empirical studies: controlled trials, cohort studies, case-control studies, natural experiments, mixed-method evaluations, qualitative studies, policy studies, feasibility studies. We will consider papers reporting opinions with evidence, and papers presenting evidence from scoping reviews and systematic reviews.

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Prof. Dr. Thilo Kroll
Dr. Kate Frazer
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.