Health Inequity Reduction in Thailand: On the Way Toward Healthy Public Policy

Recently, health inequity initiatives introduced by the World Health Organization emphasizes actions on social determinants of health with collaboration across research disciplinary and organizational boundaries in relatively innovative approach. The recent tackle of health inequity initiatives in Thailand, SIRNet – Social Inequity Reduction Network, illustrates a good instance of this kind of effort. This paper describes the development of the three years collaborative projects among five organizations in Thailand and its attempt to address social determinants of health and formulate a set of effective policy recommendations based on real-world problems in Thai context. The study examines working models across academic and organizational boundaries focused on researches linkage, professional practices, communities and networks actions, leadership skills and healthy public policy process. While a wide-ranging of information collected and knowledge emerged from broad action researches, the academic community states the tendency to the arguments of theories of justice and the consensus of strategy. Therefore, although the strong conceptual framework of social health equity for Thai society is established, the community based policy recommendation is rarely analyzed and formulated by researchers. Although the collaborative programs are initiated among the organizational leaders, the implementation process includes only few people into the working group. Hence, the change seems to be presented in individual and network level, but not in the organizational level. We need effective models of collaboration to bridge various gaps between researchers, social workers and policy makers.